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

My suggestion is keep a log of all the time spent or wasted due to this issue. Once enough people/companies start to see how much time and money they are losing due to Microsofts inactivity and incompetence the lawsuits will start. At that point and only at that point will Microsoft get off it's high horse and start taking this matter seriously. At 126 location with over 20+ thousand clients we have set up our help desk for the clients to use a simple form every single time they are interrupted with is issue and what happened/damage was caused when the issue occurred. We provide this compiled data every week and provide it to our legal teams.

once again today, no issues - it no longer pops up .. this is true on my older Win12 machine as well

(I did nothing to change this from last week when it was an issue, and there has not been any Windows update since then either ... beats me)

You're one of the lucky ones. Still happening on my work laptop - networked. I do have some level of admin privileges on the laptop - but not full privileges. But I was thinking that I better not tinker with disabling any services etc - just in case, because there's no telling whether it is going to create issues in other areas --- issues for the network admins that is.

As an admin my self, I do not want any users to disable any services they do not know just to fix a slight issue. I rather want people to come to me to solve the issue before doing anything on they're computers and break something by accident, which i have done my self on my own test and private computers multiple times, so i know what to do and what to not do (most of the time).

The only fix I have found so far, is to disable group policy updates thru gpedit or registry, which is not recommended to do on a AD joined computer, but can safely be done on a home computers since it is most likely not AD joined.

Here's a question. Is there any way to safely suppress the gpupdate function that's apparently causing this until MS fixes the problem? I so rarely make changes to the group policies that I think I could live if it's not forcing updates multiple times per day.

The "Group Policy Client" service seems like a juicy suspect. I'm too chicken to try it myself.

Yes, there is. You can do this on your own computers, but please do not do it on your work laptop since this will make your computers non compliant with the group policy servers after a while, your laptop might loose AD access, that means you will not be able to login again before IT fixes the issue.

In the group policy editor set the policy Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\Turn off background refresh of Group Policy to disabled.

Alternatively, you can do the registry approach.
Location: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Key: DisableBkGndGroupPolicy

Setting: DWORD set to 1

once again today, no issues - it no longer pops up .. this is true on my older Win12 machine as well

(I did nothing to change this from last week when it was an issue, and there has not been any Windows update since then either ... beats me)

It happens to me all the time. very randomly after hours. I notice this, because I'm developing for hours and all of a sudden the explorer appears in the foreground.

very recently (just minutes before this post). so I was checking the event logs.

at that time there were only logs about

System > Aggregated Threat assessment of current system instance (EnhancedPhishingProtection-Events Service)