// the find
valinet/ExplorerPatcher
This project aims to enhance the working environment on Windows
ExplorerPatcher hooks and patches explorer.exe and related shell binaries to bring Windows 10-style taskbar, Start menu, and Alt+Tab back to Windows 11 (and now supports a wide range of Windows builds). It's for people who hate the Windows 11 shell redesign and want the old workflow back without switching to a third-party shell replacement.
Genuinely deep reverse-engineering work — it hooks into ShellExperienceHost, TwinUI, and StartMenu internals rather than doing a shallow theme swap, which is why it can restore actual Windows 10 behavior instead of just visuals. Built-in updater and a clean uninstall path (including an ep_setup_patch flow) shows real attention to the install/uninstall lifecycle, not just a one-way hack. 34k stars and an active Discord/issue tracker mean it's been battle-tested across a huge range of Windows 10/11 builds and hardware, including ARM64.
It's fundamentally patching undocumented Windows internals (dllmain.c, hooking.h, ShellExperienceHostPatches.cpp), so every new Windows Insider build is a potential breakage risk and the maintainer is on a permanent treadmill chasing Microsoft's changes. It requires closing and relaunching explorer.exe on install and runs with elevation, which is a legitimate concern for anyone running this on a work machine or in a managed environment. No automated tests anywhere in the tree — given it's live-patching a system process, that's a real gap; regressions are presumably caught by users, not CI. Windows-only, MSBuild/vcxproj-only build system with no CMake, so contributing means owning a full Visual Studio + WDK setup just to compile.