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Windows 11 File Explorer freezes for several seconds on startup, regularly

Anonymous
2023-01-18T07:02:29+00:00

I have had this problem now for several months, and it's really starting to annoy me: When I start the file explorer, the window opens but freezes for several seconds. When I say several, I'm talking about between 3 and 20(!!!) seconds. It doesn't happen on every startup, and never happens if somewhere another explorer window is already open.

The problem persists over sleeps and reboots, and restarting the explorer from the task manager. I find it very weird that I could not find any other posts on this, since a friend of mine is also experiencing the exact same issue.

The freezing is certainly not caused by insufficient hardware; we both have modern laptops. He has a Intel Evo in his, I have a Ryzen 7 5800U. We obviously both have modern SSDs. One thing I do remember is that, possibly by chance, I had just mounted the first network drive for that PC, and my friend also has that network drive connected. I have however since tried unmounting it, and have now replaced it with a link from a specific directory, in the hope that that would maybe prevent it from synchronously loading the drive on startup, but neither the link nor completely unmounting has fixed the issue. Also, I need the network drive on a daily basis, I cannot permanently remove it. The freeze also both happens when I am in the network from which I can reach the drive, and when I am not within it and cannot reach it. I want to point out however that the explorer takes way shorter than the freezing time to discover the drive is unreachable once started up.

I have attached a screenshot of the explorer freezed on startup, in case that might be useful to see what it has at that point loaded and what not. Note also that one of the directories on the left (blacked out) are located on the network drive, in case that may have to do something with it,

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-01-25T15:23:11+00:00

    Oh, and when right-clicking onto the link to remove it, it freezed another time for like 10 seconds (first freeze was like 20 seconds). Unusable.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-01-21T16:29:14+00:00

    Hello I have the same problem but for me, sometimes the File Explorer comes back after 20 seconds, and sometimes it never comes back , so I have to kill the explorer process and relaunch an new explorer process. VERY annoying. What should I do?

    4 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2023-01-18T14:45:49+00:00

    I have recovered the system. The original problem persists. I think I don't have to explain that explorer was restarted in the meantime. I also previously already cleared the explorer cache and history, with absolutely no change, thus I will not attempt that again.

    I have re-installed all updates (I did have all updates installed before the recovery). I have yet to experience the freezing again since the updates, but I am confident that it is not fixed, since I haven't really changed anything, and as I said before, it doesn't always happen. When I experience the freezing again, I will reboot into save mode and test it there (not the weird save mode you're talking about, the REAL save mode).

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2023-01-18T12:29:00+00:00

    Well done, now I can’t login anymore. The camera doesn’t work and it says I should configure a pin despite me having one configured, and when pressing „configure pin“ an error message pops up, stack overflow, process got terminated (effectively, translated from German)

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2023-01-25T15:21:24+00:00

    So, after some days a network file is back in the recommended files, and the startup freezing is back. Note that I was currently not in the VPN, so the network drive is unreachable. Still, this is such poor implementation if the drive communication isn't asynchonously done, no matter how long the communication takes.

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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