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File explorer won't open

Anonymous
2024-12-20T02:29:57+00:00

Today my MSI GS76 Stealth laptop with an Intel i9 processor, 32GB of memory, running Windows 11 23H2 locked up and would not do anything. I had to let the battery run down so I could reboot it. When I did restart, File Explorer would not open. I restarted again then tried a complete shutdown and reboot and it still would not open. I went into the recovery environment and used a restore point that was created earlier in the day. The restore point recovery was successful, but File Explorer still will not start. I have tried the pinned shortcut on my taskbar, the shortcut on my desktop, and the shortcut on my start menu, and none of them work. Three of the icons for documents on my desktop have blanked out, and when I click on properties and try to change them back to what they were the properties dialog box is extremely slow to open. When it finally does open, I get an error message that the target file does not exist. (These documents are on a mapped network drive.) Shortcuts for programs seem to be fine and working properly.

When I did the restore point restart during the boot process after Windows opened, I got several messages about certain Microsoft Store apps such as Translucent TB and Phone Link not being able to open, but they did open successfully from the Start Menu.

While I was writing this question, File Explorer finally opened up 6 times (I guess once for each time I tried to start it.) File Explorer is set to open up to This PC, and all I see on any of them when it does open is the Desktop icon with a spinning cursor. After about an hour, a few more shortcut icons appeared, but nothing further happened. None of the shortcuts that appeared will open anything. The wait cursor just continues to spin, and File Explorer is not responding.

When I open up programs that call on a mini-File Explorer to access a file, again it takes forever to open, and I cannot do anything with it.

I ran SFC/scannow which showed no integrity violations.

I do not have a Windows ISO on a bootable medium, and I cannot do an in-place update to fix Windows, so I am at a total loss as to what to do now.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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  1. John DeV 162K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-12-20T06:10:21+00:00

    Hi, good day! I'm John Dev a Windows user like you and I'll be happy to assist you today. I know this has been difficult for you, rest assured, I'm going to do my best to help you.

    Please try the following methods below.

    **Restart Windows Explorer

    Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.

    Select the Processes tab.

    Scroll down and select Windows Explorer, Right click then select Restart.

    **Press Windows key+R to open Run then type:

    shell:recent\AutomaticDestinations

    press Enter

    Delete the contents of the resulting folder

    Kindly do the same on the path below

    shell:recent\CustomDestinations

    After that, restart your computer

    Note: This will remove the shortcuts in Quick Access but not the actual files

    **Please try to run DISM to check for any system errors and corrupted files.

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/usi...

    After that, restart your computer using clean boot of Windows 11.

    **Perform a Clean Boot

    Determine whether a background program or a software conflict is causing the issue.

    Press Windows key+R to open Run then type: msconfig

    Press Enter

    Select System Configuration > go to the Services tab.

    (Important) Select and make sure to put a check mark on "Hide all Microsoft services"

    Click Disable all.

    Go to Startup tab > Open Task Manager > Disable all the unnecessary services running there. Restart your computer.

    Please check the support article at the link below for more details.

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-t...

    Kindly let me know if this helps or if you have any further concerns by clicking the "Reply" button at the end of my response. I will appreciate it.

    Kind regards,

    John DeV

    Independent Advisor

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-12-20T13:56:03+00:00

    I kept working on this. I was able to download the media creation tool onto a flash drive, however the computer would not boot from it even though the BIOS was set to use the USB drive first before going to the C:\ drive. It kept going directly to the C:\ drive. I then tried to download a Windows 11 iso, but

    Windows told me my hardware did not support Windows 11 because it did not have TPM 2.0, which is of course nonsense. I went into settings Windows update and downloaded a repair update (I didn't even know Windows had that ability) but it would not run for the same reason. I used Microsoft's suggestion to go into the BIOS and enable TPM 2.0, but the computer would not boot into the BIOS. I went into the repair environment and got into the BIOS that way but there were no settings in the BIOS to enable TPM 2.0. I did a regular restart, and lo and behold it rebooted and everything was fine. It has now been working properly for the past 8 hours or so. I don't know what was wrong, and how it got fixed, but everything seems to be OK now. Thank you for the help. I sincerely appreciate it.

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