[Swisstone]

The fact the start menu lives in its own process is an implementation detail, no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe, so no one should expect start menu to be part of explorer.exe. Third party utilities should never kill random processes to begin with... that's a non-sense.

[userbinator]

no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe

I'm pretty sure the older versions of Windows actually had that in the (much more detailed) documentation they came with.

[_3u10]

Why shouldn’t they kill processes? If the OS didn’t want third party apps to be able to kill random processes it wouldn’t provide APIs for it to do so.