Safely pausing explorer.exe

[computerfreaker]

I'm working on an alternate shell which has to run on top of Windows Explorer, without admin rights. This shell includes a tray, but the tray module won't work when Explorer is running because Explorer receives the tray icons' messages. (This isn't a problem with my shell's tray module - when I kill explorer.exe and run my shell, its tray module works as expected.)

I'm wondering if there's a way to safely pause Explorer while my shell is running? I don't want to kill Explorer because of the potential for messing up a user's system, and if my shell crashes, that leaves the user without a shell until they restart their system. If I understand correctly, suspending the explorer.exe process would have the same result if my shell goes down. I need a way of keeping Explorer inactive, but in a way that only holds while my shell is running. Is that even possible?


P. S. If there's a way of getting my app to receive tray messages without taking down Explorer, I'd be delighted to take that route instead.

EDIT: I did some more research and it looks like I could subclass the tray window and handle the necessary messages. That also looks relatively risky in terms of crashing Explorer, especially on 64-bit systems. Is anyone familiar with the procedure for doing this? (I'm familiar with subclassing, but not subclassing such things as Explorer. I'm also not familiar with the pitfalls of subclassing 64-bit apps.)

Hooking also appears to be an option, but I'd rather not set off any antivirus apps if I can avoid it, and hooking seems to be a major red flag for heuristic-based AVs.