Windows 11 Cannot Open Any Folders Due to W11's File Indexing (and solution)

[907rider]

I have recently run into an issue (and determined a **half** fix) with Windows 11's file indexing system. I'm making a post here because I searched high/low for clues and this stymied me for about a day.

 

Backstory: I am a data scientist working with mostly low resolution satellite imagery. In total I have approximately 4-million low-res images on my PC. They are mostly all 300x300 pixels so overall file size is very small. Recently my company forced an upgrade to W11 from W10. W11 immediately seemed slightly "buggy", so I left the computer on overnight thinking it would "figure itself out".

 

I came back in the morning to find that I could open all of my programs just as normal but if I tried to open a folder of any-sort by double clicking, nothing would happen. If I right-clicked on the folder and clicked "Open", the usual windows explorer window would open but it would be blank, then after a second it would close, all the screens would go blank and then everything would come back up as it was before but with no folder open. Oddly, I could go to my start menu, click on "This PC" which I had pinned there and that would open, but as soon as I tried to open my C drive or interact with that window in any-way it would lock up and I'd be presented with a "Not-Responding" message.

 

In short I had no way of opening any folders on my PC. So I took the SSD out, installed it in another W11 workstation (this one had been on W11 for quite some time and had not been having any issues). First I scanned the drive with Windows Defender, and then with Norton (used by my company). Both scans turned up no viruses. I then ran a check on the drive for errors, none were found.

 

At this point I copied all of the files from that drive to the W11 workstation. I then wiped the SSD, re-installed it in the original machine, and re-installed W11. I then copied all of the files from the W11 workstation back onto the original machine. Everything seemed to be working fine. I left the machine on overnight to do driver updates and such. I came back in the morning and THE SAME EXACT PROBLEM WAS HAPPENING AGAIN! What's worse is that the W11 workstation computer which still had a copy of the files on it was now DOING THE SAME THING!

 

I should also note that exact duplicates of all of these files are also located on a machine with Ubuntu 22.04 installed, and through all of this it had not had a single issue. It was now that I noticed that when I clicked on the start button in the W11 machines that were affected there was a small note saying "file indexing is turned off". This gave me a clue! So I went into W11's "Indexing Options" and told it to exclude all of the the main data folders that I had. I then told it to delete it's index file and rebuild. Immediately after deleting the index file I restarted the computers and everything was back to working 100% fine! It has now been almost a week and neither W11 machine has had so-much as a hiccup.

 

I'm unsure on what happened between W10 and W11 but something must have changed because that computer had had that many files on it for close to 6 months while running W10, and immediately ran into this issue when upgraded to W11. To me it is absolutely crazy that W11 could be "bricked" in such a simple manner. MICROSOFT GET IT TOGETHER!! Honestly, if I didn't have a few programs which are only available on Windows (specifically looking at you ESRI with your ArcGIS Pro) I would probably be swapped over to Linux full time.

 

TLDR: if you are running W11 and cannot open any folders, search "Indexing Locations" in the start menu. Manually find and exclude folders with large amounts of files in them. Then tell W11 to rebuild it's indexing file and restart.