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

As an IT person - I openly admit "Broken" IS a trigger word. I hate thinking that something I've built doesn't work correctly. It triggers me to Do My Job and fix the problem. And then, I Thank the person who pointed it out. Coding is a big messy world, things will break - people who report the errors are Helping you out! There's ZERO excuse for this bug being left uncorrected for so long. There are millions of people whose workflows involve having a window open in the background. It's not even a topic worth debating. Someone at MS is being lazy and/or living in denial about their own work/skills/abilities. Just get over it and fix it. Do your job.

Microsoft: We'd fix it, but we're too busy adding freaky looking Teams avatars that no one asked for or wants.

Release Preview is an Insider channel, for stuff that is very close to public release. It's very stable, and accessible in Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program.

However, I'd recommend just a bit more patience. If something is in the Release Preview channel, it will be released to the public in either a Patch Tuesday (2nd Tuesday of the month), or a Preview Update (4th Tuesday of the month). You can find the Preview Updates in Windows Update > Advanced Options > Optional Updates, and it might require the option "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available", not sure.

All that being said, it sounds like:

11/28 might be the day that the Preview Update is available.

12/12 might be the day that the Release Update is available.

I'm expecting the behavior to change from "File Explorer steals focus" to "File Explorer shows for 1 frame but does not steal focus", which is what the Dev channel has had for a long time now. Not perfect, but much much better.

Feel free to hop into Release Preview channel right now, if you want. You generally pick up fixes a little bit earlier than the Release channel, while staying very stable.

As always, thanks for the detailed information. I've taken a look at the Insider channel, and while it appears to be a low-friction way to explore updates I'm not ready to take the dive yet. On the other hand, I'm jaded; when the words "Microsoft," "fix," and "soon," are used in the same sentence, I think: "unicorn." :)

I presume much of the recent discussion is a joke.

And if Microsoft is suggesting multi-key commands .. well ... forcing something like that might violate the law (ADA). They should try using it with only one hand. This product has been around for what .. over 30-years and causing File Explorer to now pop up at random is an enhancement?

Maybe they are taking advice from Elon Musk who apparently has removed the turn-signal lever from recent versions of the Model 3 Tesla. https://www.autoblog.com/2023/09/05/its-a-dealbreaker-tesla-fans-react-to-new-model-3-terrible-turn-signal-buttons/#:~:text=Look%20inside%20the%20new%20Model,side%20of%20the%20steering%20wheel.

Hello fellow suffers,

I have a chink of good news for us all. Having spent the past few hours testing the Insider Release Preview build:

Windows 11 Education - 22631.2787 It all looks good! :D

My test computer sits in an Group Policy OU that I have control over.
I re-tested the computer with build 22631.2715, which as I found out a few weeks ago would very reliably trigger if ANY Group Policy Preference was set OR if any Group Policy had been changed since the last refresh. The issue was still there in .2715

However after moving to 22631**.2787** I have not had one File Explorer pop-up! Not ever a flicker (to my eyes anyway, yours may be better)

Now, whilst this is indeed great news and am very pleased to see that Microsoft might be edging towards a fix, We all know they could pull the fix from the preview build before it enters the 'Stable' builds.

But this is the best result I've seen since the release of tabbed File Explorer in 22H2.

@Jacob W. Klein thank you for the detail. Unfortunately, my hands are tied with regards to OS versions on my work machine, but I will consider it for home.

As you say, the 1 frame update would be a significant improvement.

I do recall a video from @Bill Moller (3rd Nov, bottom of page 44) showing that a fix that worked only sometimes. You can see the Explorer window flicker in the "working" video. It's not clear if that was from the 23H2 dev build.

In the "sometimes works" video, the File Explorer flicker remained in the background (so it's doing something, but not commandeering the foreground). Also, the build number at the time of the video was 23H2 / 22631.2428 on November 3, shortly after 23H2 was released to seekers (as I understand it, "seekers" are folks who manually "check for updates" Clarifying the Confusion Surrounding Optional Updates for “Seekers” (batchpatch.com)).