help File Explorer Slow to Open

pilotpine · July 27, 2020

I've been experiencing the rather puzzling problem of file explorer taking several seconds to open from the taskbar. Since I built this PC I've never had this issue and it has only appeared within the past few months, needless to say I am getting more and more frustrated with it recently.

My troubleshooting and research done:

To start I have a SSD as my C drive, with a HDD for bulk storage. Nothing wrong here to my knowledge. Next I thought It could have something to do with Microsoft lovely 'quick access' business, disabled everything I could and nothing. I then took to the internet to see if anyone else has ran into this problem along with a potential fix. I found some forums talking about the shortcut acting up, this led me to do everything from recreate the shortcut by recreating the target path to creating a 'This PC' shortcut. What I did discover from this exercise is all of these shortcuts execute instantly from the desktop or start menu, but if you want to launch from the task bar you may as well go make some coffee and a snack before returning. My research then led to indexing. After disabling all files for in the 'indexing options' menu I was very disappointed to find this fix in fact fixed nothing.

TLDR, File Explorer and I are not currently on good terms and I am hoping someone else has experienced this and/or knows a fix.

Cheers