Can you restart the launcher apart from restarting the phone? On my Galaxy S Android 2.2 , I just got the 'Activiate Starter took too long to respond . Force close ?', which I did.

Now the home screen is black.  :)

So I killed the starter program, so it seems. I should have looked at the message closer.

Apart from turning off and restarting the phone, is it possible to restart the main program on a phone ?
You could probably start the application with the abd shell

in the shell type

am start [DETAILS]


the usage is

usage: am [start|broadcast|instrument]
       am start -D INTENT
       am broadcast INTENT
       am instrument [-r] [-e &lt;ARG_NAME&gt; &lt;ARG_VALUE&gt;] [-p &lt;PROF_FILE&gt;]
                [-w] &lt;COMPONENT&gt;

       INTENT is described with:
                [-a &lt;ACTION&gt;] [-d &lt;DATA_URI&gt;] [-t &lt;MIME_TYPE&gt;]
                [-c &lt;CATEGORY&gt; [-c &lt;CATEGORY&gt;] ...]
                [-e|--es &lt;EXTRA_KEY&gt; &lt;EXTRA_STRING_VALUE&gt; ...]
                [--ez &lt;EXTRA_KEY&gt; &lt;EXTRA_BOOLEAN_VALUE&gt; ...]
                [-e|--ei &lt;EXTRA_KEY&gt; &lt;EXTRA_INT_VALUE&gt; ...]
                [-n &lt;COMPONENT&gt;] [-f &lt;FLAGS&gt;] [&lt;URI&gt;]


Some examples can be seen on this page.

It would require you to know a few details about the launcher in question though. It may be worth reading this thread about am usage from the android-framework google group.