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

I can quite happily confirm, the latest Preview patch fixes the gpupdate issue bringing new Explorer windows to the front/taking focus.

December 4, 2023—KB5032288 (OS Builds 22621.2792 and 22631.2792) Preview - Microsoft Support

To grab the update you can get this via Windows Settings - Windows Update.

Or directly from Windows Update Catalog:

Microsoft Update Catalog

The update with this fix should automatically apply to all users after Tuesday December 12th.

This took 1 year and 1 month to fix... has to be a record no?

Yep. I'm a Windows Insider, and have been testing their fix. Instead of popping up a window that steals focus, the fix now pops up a window for 1 frame then disappears, without stealing focus. An improvement that no longer interferes with my gaming and shouldn't interfere with productivity, but ... still not perfect.

I'd expect the release channel to get the fix when 23H2 releases later this year, even though I've tried to push for a quicker fix.

Completely agree.

They know the issue happened as soon as a Cumulative patch and code was sent to machines to enable "Tabbed Explorer Browsing" (back in November/December time last year). As the default first Windows 11 22H2 image (from September/October) that released did not have tabbed explorer browsing and did not have this issue we are all experiencing.

I think they worked out early on that any future Cumulative patch would not resolve this issue with out removing Tabbed Explorer Browsing. They wont remove tabbed explorer browsing due to it being a unique selling point. They sold this feature to companies saying "its a good time to switch to Windows 11 now from 10 to gain access to this long requested feature".

The reason MS worked out from early on of this exact issue, is of people like my self (IT Admins) and many others whom reported the issue to MS directly via our companies premium support package plus community members (i.e. this original post too!)

The only way they was able to fix this issue currently is to release a whole new OS (23H2), which we have tested and the last two preview builds they have released does have this fix in place.

What's shocking and sad to see, is moderators must see the amount of people posting here, and it shouldn't be left to the community to predict how MS work and predict when they will release a fix.

My prediction will be this will be only fixed when they officially release 23H2 in the Autumn/Fall period of this year. But again, its sad we have to do this type of prediction.

As a side note, I have prevented my company of 20,000 computers from migrating to Windows 11 because of this bug. I would imagine many more companies have done the same. Or they have spotted this issue too late and rolling back to issuing Windows 10 again.

Its a serious bug.

I been testing one of the latest Windows Insider builds on "Canary Channel", which is flagged as version 23H2. This version does not have the explorer pop up issue when gpupdate is being ran by following this process:

• Close all explorer windows
• Open an explorer window
• open CMD so its in front of the explorer window
• run in CMD gpupdate /force

Doing the above on this version keeps CMD at the front of the explorer window, unlike current builds of windows where the explorer window will pop to the front.

So we can then assume Microsoft wont be fixing this issue with cumulative updates for 22H2 (as this issue is now 6 months+ old) and we instead have to wait until 23H2 is officially released sometime in October/November this year (2023).

The only positive is that at least this "test build" does not have the issue.

Hi!

No, I haven't tried your solution. Too complicated for me to try on my own and Microsoft no longer has live help available by phone. I guess I'll have to wait until Microsoft fixes it with an update.