Explorer Wont Die!

[maqleod]

explorer is not necessary (for the most part) - there are plenty of shell replacements and alternate file managers out there, most of which use less resources than explorer for the same tasks, but as was mentioned earlier, explorer is a core part of windows and while you can minimize it's use, it is called by other applications all the time for at least some functionality (file copy dialogues for example).

If you're really deadset on ridding yourself of explorer, try using Geoshell, it's a very minimalistic shell replacement (basically you can have absolutely nothing but your wallpaper load if you really want it). I only have a clock/cmd prompt and system tray show up. It's open source and quite stable, also much faster than explorer as a shell. I also use Y'z dock with it for my app launching.