Windows 11--most recently opened Explorer window keeps popping up into the foreground

Anonymous
2023-01-01T17:15:47+00:00

About a month ago Windows Explorer started the annoying habit of routinely moving its most recently opened window into the foreground. Is there a way to stop it from doing this?

For example, I'll open an Explorer window to open a file into another application, and a few minutes later, for no apparent reason, Windows Explorer will interrupt the application by popping its Explorer window into the foreground. The same thing will happen when watching a video: a minute or two into watching the video and the most recently opened Explorer window will move into the foreground interrupting the video.

The only way to stop this behavior is to close all Explorer windows while watching a video or working in another application. Annoying as heck. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Microsoft Windows 11 Home Version 10.0.22621 Build 22621

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T11:05:52+00:00

    This looks like it may fix the issue. Any ideas when this will be made available to the general public? I also have this issue and it is very counter productive. I can not recommend windows 11 to my company while issues like this persist to interrupt production flow.

    A possible fix for this is included in build 23403.1001, which was released to the Dev Channel on 8 March 2023:

    [File Explorer]

    • Fixed an underlying issue believed to be the cause of File Explorer unexpectedly jumping into the foreground sometimes.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T09:26:24+00:00

    You are right, with that exact process "open Explorer, do not touc it" I also can reproduce it. If I find some time today, I will try to curtail the GPOs to the one that causes the issue.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T08:53:53+00:00

    What are your AntiVirus solutions? Mine is Trellix/Mcafee, with a full set of Mvision, EDR, DLP and all the good things....

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T08:50:08+00:00

    Cannot reproduce it on mine. I do have Teams, OneDrive, Outlook running and experience this occasional pop up every day.

    Interestingly, I couldn't reproduce it again until I closed Explorer and tried again, so it seems to only affect new Explorer windows? I will amend my repro steps above to account for this.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-05-23T08:48:03+00:00

    Do NOT use an elevation tool, it has to run in your Users context. If you elevate the CMD it will happen in session 0 and you will not get a result, if this is a connected issue. Also you will not get RSOP data for the User in session 0

    @OC: Are you the admin by yourself? If you can reproduce the issue, you can open the Group Policy Editor and FOR EACH GPO that is bind to your User OR client, go to the delegation tab, advanced, then, for User-Policies, add your user and choose "apply group policy" - "deny" - then after any single change, go back to your system and do the "gpupdate /force" command. Do this for any bind User GPO to deny your User one by one and test, if it stops, you found the GPO with the setting that cause the issue. If none of the User polices do it, do the same with your computer object to any computer bind gpo, add your computer and deny the policy then force the gpo one by one.

    If you do this correctly, you should find the gpo that creates the effect and you also know, if it is the user or computer part that causes this.

    Then, each setting in this GPO could be the issue, but you maybe want to post the GPO, with the affected settings here, so we can match.

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