Windows File Explorer Not Responding (Solved)
If you arrived here is because you already tried all the suggestions that are also all the same from various websites and didn’t manage to solve the problem
I have this PC where I had previously installed Windows 10. Explorer was crashing continuously, immediately after opening it (well, it always runs in the background. I mean while I actually opened a windows of it)
Tried everything to sort the problem out, eventually upgraded to Windows 11, hoping that it would help in solving the problem. Nothing
Eventually I realised I had a mapped network drive and noticed it was taking a looong time to load and eventually File Exploder (sic) would stop responding. How rude of it!
What was that telling me? That the issue was somehow connected to the networking. After some research and tests I did the following and it worked for me:
- Open regedit.exe
- Navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider
- With NetworkProvider selected on the left panel right-click on the right one and select “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.”
- Create this new value with name RestoreConnection and Value Data to 0
- Restart
What we did here was to disable the “Could not reconnect all network drives” notification. There won’t be any significant loss of functionality after operating this change
If the problem is still there you could try disabling IPv6. If you would like to lean more about it, this is the link. However, what needs to be done is the following:
- Open regedit.exe
- Navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters
- Create a DWORD (32-bit) named DisabledComponents with value 28
- Restart
Finally, last suggestion is valid especially if you mapped network drive points to an old SMBv1 share
- Open regedit.exe
- Locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network[drive letter] (The [drive letter] placeholder represents the mapped drive)
- Create a DWORD (32-bit) named ProviderFlags with value 1
- Restart
ProviderFlags: a REG_DWORD value representation of a Boolean value (0/1), indicating whether the RemotePath refers to a DFS root. If the RemotePath is not a DFS root, this value is normally omitted
The stuff above fixed the problem for me. Hope it works for you too. BTW, I hope you made a backup copy of the Windows Registry before doing anything described in here, else you might be screwed by now
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