DescentBB

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.

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.

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.