Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

It clear from the running of this issue that MS does not seem to care

Here I am, replying to my own post.

I think I may have solved my whole problem. After disabling all indexing, app spying and all the other brain-dead AI **** vendors try auto-installing without my consent, and being totally frustrated that File Explorer would eat up all free memory in less than an hour if I used it with an external storage drive, I finally took a look at Microsoft Power-Toys, which I had, and remembered that it had added a number of VERY CONVENIENT File Explorer Ad-Ons. I went to Power Toys Settings, and under File Explorer Ad-Ons I turned all its options off. I then ran Explorer on my external drives and found that everything was now running OK. I re-enabled an option at a time, tested Explorer in turn after enabling each, until I soon had all Power-Toy File Explorer options back on (thankfully, because these Ad-Ons are wonderful), and File Explorer was STILL working OK. Apparently, when Power Toys recently updated its File Explorer Ad-Ons, something happened to instigate massive memory consumption, but resetting these options by toggling them off and then back on had fixed the issue.

Because Power Toys are popular, I wonder who else here might be able to fix their own issues by doing the same thing I just did?

After months of dissatisfaction I've just trialled Directory Opus and its lightning fast. If Windows fix the issue I'll consider moving back.

I was having this exact problem. On the chance that it will help somebody else I will post both what the problem/solution was, as well as recommendations on how to fix the problem (to Microsoft). Whether the latter is useful will depend on if somebody at Microsoft cares enough to make this right.

I have a couple of ext4 drives which are mounted via WSL in Windows 11 and then mounted as shared drives. In the past, I found that WSL automatically shuts down when there are no active "users" of the system. In practice, this means that if there is no process like a "wsl" shell running, it shuts down in less than 30 seconds. This causes the share to stop working, and Windows Explorer hangs trying to access the shared drives. To fix this, I created a startup item which runs tmux within a wsl shell, in order to prevent WSL from falling asleep.

What I have discovered is that sometimes this process fails. I need to gather more data to know what exactly. Sometimes after boot the tmux session is not running despite the startup item. I think it may be that sometimes the tmux session does run but somehow gets killed after this; this is where more data is needed. The solution (workaround, really) is to manually run WSL and start another tmux session.

Now for my recommendations to Microsoft. Please make your enumeration routines threaded / non-blocking so that when enumerating drives it doesn't hang if a drive isn't responding. My shared drives are A: and B: so it hangs immediately when Explorer is opened and it takes a long time for the timeout to occur (at least 30 seconds to a minute). Additionally, please make the WSL exit smarter - if a drive is mounted and being shared via SMB this should be sufficient to make WSL not exit or fall asleep. I don't know if this is a general issue with background processes in general, as I can imagine there might be other things like running a web server which the user would not want to stop working but I have no experience with these, however these might be good to check if a generalized solution is available.

I hope this helps someone!