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

Unfortunately, these steps didn't fix the problem for me :-(

its been months and several updates since the issue started and there's no sign of a fix.

I'm going to offer some potential ideas for Microsoft to investigate...hopefully they are going to see this.

1. could hardware acceleration/throttling be a possible factor?
2. what about the opposite. maybe when certain hardware idles? (i.e., HDD/SSD, GPU etc.)
3. maybe there's something that was edited in the execution code for windows explorer due to one of the many previous security updates given to us to address the many vulnerabilities windows 11 launched with?
4. is it something to do with how windows explorer is immediately set to a *suspended* state in task manager once you don't have it in the foreground for a given period of time?

I'm done being patient, I'm sick and tired of playing games only to be forced out of them...I play most of my games with a controller on my PC while the screen I use is my TV, so I can enjoy playing from my bed because i have a bad back and want to be semi-comfortable while i game for long periods of time, I can't keep getting up every 10-15 minutes just to change windows over and over again...it's ridiculous and it needed to be fixed, well, months ago when it was first brought to your attention. to get the typical "well, did you try this..." banter out of the way:

All of my drivers are up to date, I regularly clean and optimize my drives and run system, networking and hardware checks weekly/bi-weekly. I check for updates on the Microsoft store weekly and every time I update my system, I run the system file checker command in administrative command prompt to ensure there was no issues with the new update and FYI...no, I haven't run a clean install because it never should be the first thing we do. besides, it never properly fixes anything and is a temporary solution to the original problem. I don't have any third-party antivirus software because Windows Security Essentials works fine. so, all of the most common things y'all ask us to check have been done. worst case scenario is your Dev Team has to pick apart the windows explorer application and see if there is anything in its code that could be tampering with how it functions.

I'm sorry if this came off rude, but it's frustrating that this has been a consistent ongoing issue that so many people in the Microsoft Community have continued to make you aware of and nothing has been done to fix it.

system specs:
Alienware Aurora R13Windows 11 HomeOS Build: 22621.1928Version 22H2Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti12th gen intel core i716 GB RAM

Had this problems for quite awhile now. Only occurred after laptop startup/restart and when using a shortcut for a third-party spreadsheet app from within a folder on the Desktop that had been created to store various shortcuts. Solution for me: 1-Open Explorer, 2-Click the three dots "...", 3-Click "Options", 4-Click "View", 5-Scroll down almost halfway through the list to see "Launch folder windows in a separate process" (it's checkbox did not have a checkmark), 6-Click the Checkbox for "Launch folder windows ..." to select, and 7-Click "Apply" in the lower right corner. Hope this works for others.

Thanks for posting. I just did that - followed that above. But the gpupdate /force thing still makes the explorer window pop up. So that method most likely won't resolve what's happening with Win 11.

Had this problems for quite awhile now. Only occurred after laptop startup/restart and when using a shortcut for a third-party spreadsheet app from within a folder on the Desktop that had been created to store various shortcuts. Solution for me: 1-Open Explorer, 2-Click the three dots "...", 3-Click "Options", 4-Click "View", 5-Scroll down almost halfway through the list to see "Launch folder windows in a separate process" (it's checkbox did not have a checkmark), 6-Click the Checkbox for "Launch folder windows ..." to select, and 7-Click "Apply" in the lower right corner. Hope this works for others.