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

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-03-22T16:10:38+00:00

    I have Win11Pro and am, like so many others, experiencing this issue.

    The question is: Did you upgrade to Win11Pro from Win10Pro, or did you install it fresh? The suggestion from @Steve Singletary is that there's a difference between the upgrade and the clean install.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-03-22T16:01:47+00:00

    I'm with @Diplocaulus on this. If we're saying this issue is caused by the upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, that's potentially useful info for Microsoft.

    However, I do have a spare Windows 11 Pro key and am tempted to try this approach to see if it resolves this highly frustrating issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-03-16T19:29:24+00:00

    I updated to win 11 a couple of weeks ago, and encounter the same situation of a background explorer window popping to the foreground while I'm working. This only started happening ever since my transition to win 11. I do have connected USB stick drive with directories open from that drive. My USB stick connects to the USB port of my computer monitor, and the monitor connects to a Dell laptop hub, which then connects to the Dell laptop. This might not be relevant, but just mentioning only. This hasn't occurred before on my laptop with the previous operating system win 10. I will later test to see if the explorer popups occur when USB stick explorer directories of USB drive and other USB drives are NOT open. For testing and trying to narrow things down.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-03-15T17:27:51+00:00

    I use explorer patcher so that I can access speaker layouts from the taskbar

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