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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-08-05T18:53:57+00:00

    Say I open Word by clicking on a document in Explorer. As soon as Word opens, File Explorer pops up on top of it. Only happens occasionally, not much of a nuisance. The spectre of this problems still manifests.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-09-11T21:32:25+00:00

    I've got a user this is happening to. Checking event viewer, in my case anyway, seems to be related to group policy rules applying. It's only happening to this user though, so still not sure what's happening.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-09-11T21:46:24+00:00

    If you go back a ways in the thread, there are posts where people talk about being able to replicate the issue with a gpupdate /force command.

    This issue seems to be resolved for most people in the latest Windows builds. What version is your user running?

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-09-12T14:31:11+00:00

    Hey James, thanks for letting me know. Lots of pages, didn't have time to scroll them all haha. I was also able to replicate with the command. We've been having issues with many of our windows 11 systems failing to update so I'm unsure of the build, but that's probably the issue. I'll figure out the fix for the update issues and report back if we still have the issue. Thanks!

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-09-26T17:33:00+00:00

    I have the same issue with my two computers both running on AMD cpu's and one on GeForce 4090 gpu and the other on AMD 6900XT gpu, both have the same issue of tabbing me out to windows caused by this issue, explorer.exe is the only thing taking focus when i play games and it keeps randomly tab me out to Windows, it's so anoying! And to think that Microsoft can't fix this is unbelievable :(

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