File Explorer keeps freezing.

Question

Ever since the last couple of weeks' windows update, File Explorer has been freezing randomly. I do "Ctrl, Alt, Delete" to terminate the process, but it's annoying.

How can I roll back to before that update? It's causing a lot of random delays in my work.

Answer 1

Jose

I understand your disappointment. To offer a bit of clarity on how this works, Microsoft does not actually force these updates directly onto your specific corporate machine. In a managed business environment, your internal IT department utilizes deployment tools to test, approve, and push these patches to your workstation. The responsibility for testing how a new update interacts with your specific corporate security software and extensions ultimately falls on your internal systems administrators.

Since you are operating without administrative privileges, you cannot bypass corporate policies to roll back the patch yourself. Your primary course of action should be submitting a support ticket to your IT helpdesk detailing the exact freezing behavior, as they possess the administrative access required to remotely uninstall the problematic update from your machine. While you wait for their intervention, you might be able to minimize the freezing by clearing the File Explorer history, as the cache often becomes corrupted during major patches. You can do this without admin rights by typing control folders into the Windows search bar to open File Explorer Options, and then clicking the Clear button located under the Privacy section.

If the application continues to hang and you are forced to terminate it, you can at least streamline that process so you do not have to disrupt your workflow with the Task Manager screen every time. You can right-click an empty space on your desktop, select New, then Shortcut, and type cmd.exe /c taskkill /f /im explorer.exe & start explorer.exe into the location field. Naming this shortcut something like Restart Explorer gives you a dedicated, one-click desktop icon that will instantly kill the frozen process and relaunch the shell interface smoothly, serving as a much faster band-aid until your IT team resolves the root conflict.

Hope this helps :)

VP

Answer 2

Well, it's a company computer, so I don't have admin rights. I wish Microsoft would test their updates before just assuming that they're doing a great job and forcing broken updates into peoples computers...It's stupid and irresponsible. I guess I'll just continue terminating the task when it freezes... It should just work; it's a 365 subscription, so it's not free.

Answer 3

Hi Jose,

How is your issue going? Has it been resolved yet? If it has, please consider accepting the answer as it helps others sharing the same problem benefit too. Thank you :)

VP

Answer 4

Hi Jose,

When the Windows shell process, known as explorer.exe, repeatedly freezes following a system update, it typically indicates a conflict between the new patch and existing shell extensions. Rather than guessing which update caused the instability based purely on the timeframe, you can pinpoint the exact installation by reviewing your system logs. You can launch the Event Viewer and navigate to Windows Logs and then the Setup log to review recent installations, identifying the exact Knowledge Base or KB identifier that corresponds with the day your random delays began.

Once you have identified the problematic KB number, you can roll back the system either through the graphical interface or via a command-line utility. For the standard method, press the Windows key and I to open Settings, navigate to the Windows Update section, and open your Update history. Scroll to the bottom to select Uninstall updates, locate the specific patch, and execute the removal. For a more direct and often more reliable administrative approach, you can open Command Prompt with elevated privileges and type wusa /uninstall /kb:XXXXXXX, replacing the placeholder with the actual update number.

Both methods will safely stage the uninstallation and require a full system restart to revert the modified system files to their previous state. After your computer reboots and stability is restored to File Explorer, you must immediately return to the main Windows Update settings page and select the option to pause updates. Pausing the service for a few weeks ensures the Windows Update Agent does not quietly reinstall the flawed patch in the background while you wait for Microsoft to release a superseding cumulative update that resolves the freezing issue.

Hope this answer brought you some useful information. If it did, please hit “accept answer”. Should you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

VP