Un-"wierding" windows 7

[snoopy]

I have an almost-2-year-old.

When she gets loose on a keyboard, she takes computers on an input trip like they've never seen before.

She hasn't managed to confuse my Linux machine too much yet... nothing that a couple "esc" key presses won't fix. On the wife's win 7 machine, she manages to get it into all kinds of confused states. So far, the only way I know to really fix it is to reboot the machine.

I want to know if there's another way to do a "reset" on windows without having to do a full reboot or having to log out and log back in. I just want something quick and easy that will reset the UI so everything go back to normal, assuming I have no knowledge of what's been changed.

[Foil]

When my son was 1-1/2 or so, I got a touchscreen (an old used point-of-sale behemoth, durable enough for a toddler to punish a bit), hooked it up to a Win7 machine, and set up the desktop so he'd have minimal effort to start something he wanted. He loved it, and I could pull out the keyboard for short periods of time to let him hit keys and see the letters on the screen if he wanted. Worked great; I don't recall ever having to reboot or logout because he got into a weird state.

P.S. If you want, I have lots of suggestions about good educational/fun flash-based sites for kids that age, especially ones which work well for a touchscreen interface.

[Sirius]

The best I'm aware of is restarting explorer.exe, but that wouldn't work if there were applications open that had also been broken (since it doesn't restart the window manager itself - and chances are if you can do that you'd render some applications unusable anyway, so might as well log off/on). On VDI setups there's also the option to revert to a snapshot, but not only is that not particularly convenient (not quite designed for the purpose), few people use that anyway.