You dont need MFC for anything, but you can choose it if you want. From your specs, it looks like you can do just fine without it. By the way, when explorer crashes, it doesnt take your program with it You dont need to relaunch.

As a side not, most virus makers nowadays inject process into Explorer (by adding startup to a not-so-well-known Explorer/policies/run registry key) so when another virus process dies, the monitoring process (which is not seen in task manager, because it runs as part of explorer exe) reloads the virus image to memory. If you ever had a virus and wanted to remove it yourself, and killed the process in Taskmanager, it instantly reappers. If thats what you need, you can do the same, but i am not sure about the ethics of this