I've ditched explorer.exe as the shell on my XP Pro PC and replaced it with program manager (which is over 10x more efficant resources wise).

However certain programs (Kazaalite and MSN Messenger) require explorer.exe to be loaded for them to function correctly. Every time I want to load them I have to start explorer 1st which is really annoying. Is there anyway I can start explorer so it only opens a single window or something and not the whole shell (start menu, bloat and all). Would the RunAs service help at all here? Or even better does anyone know I way of just loading the shell componants these programs need without loading everything else?

Any help appriciated

Use a real shell www.geoshell.com ;-)

even task manager should do the trick, no?

I haven't encountered these 'explorer dependencies' before.