Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

Thank you so much for that insight. That description suggests that it may be my primary (one of many, many, many performance & GUI issues w/Win11) performance issues.

P.S. I despise the way Windows wants to pigeonhole everything as Doc/Vid/Whatever, so killing the goofy folder views will be bonus!

I have tried all of the helpful suggestions from other users, but nothing worked.

In the end, a Windows reset was the only thing that solved the issue, but that is the “nuclear” option that required me to reinstall all of my apps and programmes.

This is unacceptable from Microsoft!

The numerous responses, with a variety of different remedies, are typical of performance issues. There are some general truths, such as any process that has to examine a lot of files on a network drive, or an old slow flash drive, will take longer than a fast local drive, but there does appear to be some performance issues with File Explorer that are specific to Windows 11.

It's clear that Windows 11 File Explorer runs its automatic folder type discovery far more often than Windows 10 and this is an easily observed behavior. That is, in Windows 10, File Explorer will determine the folder type (e.g. Documents, Music, Pictures), based on the folder contents and then generally leave it alone. You can manually change the folder type in Windows 10 and it will stick. Windows 11, on the other hand, keeps re-running the automatic folder type discovery, making it very difficult (and often impossible) to override what it picks. The re-running of automatic folder type discovery appears to be a significant performance issue.

I set up a test folder with around 1000 pictures, set the view to Details, and enabled the column "Date Taken" (so that File Explorer has to examine the meta data of every file). This configuration is expected to create some delays, but the delays were noticeably worse with Windows 11 compared to Windows 10 on the same hardware.

Taking away the "Date Taken" column made little difference, but what made a dramatic difference was to disable automatic folder type discovery. This can only be done by enabling an option that makes all folders Generic (i.e. General Items). This means that your Pictures, Music, and Videos folders will all be treated as General Items and not have their unique view. If you can live with that, the speed up may be worth it to you.

Please note that automatic folder type discovery only runs on local disks (e.g. C:). It does not apply to removable or network drives. But some removable drives mount as a "Local Disk". Automatic folder type discovery will run on those drives.

Please also note that, with the Generic option set, it should be a simple matter to set specific folder trees, such as Pictures and Music, back to their respective folder types. Unfortunately further bugs in Windows 11 make that difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

TLDR:

From my testing, your best bet for improving Windows 11 File Explorer speed, is to enable the option to make all folders Generic (which causes File Explorer to disable its automatic folder type discovery). You can do that using WinSetView by enabling the Advanced interface and checking the option Make all folders Generic. As per the documentation, also be sure to set your preferred default views (e.g. List, Details, Icons, etc.) and then click Submit.

Please note that this will make all folders have the same view (i.e. Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents will, by default, have the same view as General Items). You can still override the default view, but due to Windows 11 bugs, you may have to override the view one folder at a time.

I can't believe this issue is still going on six months later.

None of the solutions above worked for me.

I have seelcted "This PC" as the starting point.

I have reset index.

I have unchecked "show files from Outlook.com"

I don't have any login issue on the "Home" page.

This issue is also present when saving a file from a browser and it preloads in a file, so not linked to just the "This PC", "Home", or "Qucik Access" items

One thing I did was disconnect Network Drives that were failing to connect. This reduced the open time from 45-85 seconds, down to 5-10 seconds. But this is still not acceptable. It worked perfectly fine in every other version of Windows. Explorer should be able to load first, and then try to connect. Not hold you hostage every time. I should be allowed to have network drives that are only accessable if connected to a VPN be setup regardless of if I am always connected to them or not.