Can someone clarify why autoit works and not batch or powershell?

[berbe01]

I'm on Windows 8.1.
I've been trying for weeks to make a batch file to restart Windows explorer. But when I would run the batch file, file explorer would always open up with explorer.exe even though the only lines in my batch file were
 

taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
explorer.exe 
exit

File explorer kept opening up when I would run the batch file, so I sought elsewhere and ended up trying a powershell script.
The same thing happened. Explorer would restart and open file explorer along with it.

So I did more searching and found Autoit, and one simple line of code.

Run("explorer.exe",Call(ProcessClose("explorer.exe")))

And it does exactly what I was wanting. It restarts Windows explorer and it doesn't open up file explorer with it.
I'm just confused as to why this works when the code looks exactly the same to me just different syntax

Edited August 16, 2014 by berbe01