cleanly stop and restart explorer.exe

Hi, I need to cleanly stop, then restart explorer. I have some older programs which conflict with explorer in windows 7.

Currently, I am doing this with .bat files like this:

cd C:\windows\system32
TASKKILL /F /IM “explorer.exe”
cd C:\”Program Files (x86)”\OldPrograms
start /w C:\”Program Files (x86)”\OldPrograms\Prog1.exe
cd c:\
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe

The problem is that this is getting annoying and I have several. Is there a way to do this through code? Preferably VB? I’m putting together an application that will let me choose which program to run, then disable explorer, then enable it upon termination of the program I am running.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.