Explorer hangs/crashes when opening specific drive in Win 10 & 11Pro

I had a sporadic problem in Win 10 Pro 21h2 with explorer hanging & crashing when accessing a specific NVMe designated as a download/catchall repository drive and it happened again today, a few days after doing an iso-based upgrade to Win 11 Pro 22h2.

It typically only begins after I've downloaded something -- but not always -- and Event Viewer offers no clues as to what's happening other than telling me that explorer was hanging.

The drive is healthy.

When this problem pops up and I attempt to view the download folder/drive through Firefox, explorer will hang and crash. If I open File Explorer and try to open the drive from the rightmost panel within File Explorer, explorer will hang and crash. But if I open File Explorer and try to open the drive from the leftmost panel explorer will only hang and crash about 50% of the time; the other 50% of the time it will properly list all the files & folders within the drive in the rightmost panel as it always does.

And of course this issue typically resolves itself after a few minutes of it starting. That leads me to think it has something to do with explorer's indexing of the drive, but... I don't know.

I've done a few searches but haven't come up with anything; hopefully I didn't miss an obvious fix somewhere. Does anyone have a suggestion for what might be happening?

Could some hidden malware causes the issue? First scan the drive with Windows Defender or your third party antivirus (right-click and select scan with...) Then download Superantispyware or Malwarebytes Antimalware and do a full scan of your computer and make sure you include this drive. To make sure no malware runs in the background interfering with the scan, restart in Safe Mode. To do that hold SHIFT and restart. You should see a choice to continue or troubleshoot. Select troubleshoot and then select the Advanced startup option. You should see a list of how to start Windows. Select 4 Safe Mode, or 5 Safe Mode with network if you need internet access. Some WiFi cards don't automatically connect in safe mode, use a LAN cable if you want internet access.

spapakons said:

Could some hidden malware causes the issue? First scan the drive with Windows Defender or your third party antivirus (right-click and select scan with...) Then download Superantispyware or Malwarebytes Antimalware and do a full scan of your computer and make sure you include this drive. To make sure no malware runs in the background interfering with the scan, restart in Safe Mode. To do that hold SHIFT and restart. You should see a choice to continue or troubleshoot. Select troubleshoot and then select the Advanced startup option. You should see a list of how to start Windows. Select 4 Safe Mode, or 5 Safe Mode with network if you need internet access. Some WiFi cards don't automatically connect in safe mode, use a LAN cable if you want internet access.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! I should've mentioned this already: Defender and Malwarebytes have been run on all of my drives. And while it's far from comprehensive or scientific, I've also watched network, CPU, and OS activity while explorer is having this issue and I haven't seen anything concerning.

It could be completely coincidental and it could be that I'm just misremembering, but my brain wants to say this is only happening after I've downloaded zipped files. Since it's such an intermittent problem though I haven't kept a log. I'll do that from here on out.

I'm an enthusiast at best so it's likely there's something in Event Viewer that I haven't uncovered yet. I'm snowed in so I planned on spending time later today looking into that.

Do you have any compression app such as WinRAR? If not install WinRAR or 7zip or whatever and make it default for .zip files and other formats. This might fix your issue which I suspect is because Windows try to figure out what to do with the compressed file you try to download. If you have a default application for it, it should not spend time to figure out what to do.

spapakons said:

Do you have any compression app such as WinRAR? If not install WinRAR or 7zip or whatever and make it default for .zip files and other formats. This might fix your issue which I suspect is because Windows try to figure out what to do with the compressed file you try to download. If you have a default application for it, it should not spend time to figure out what to do.

Click to expand...

Lo and behold, Explorer was the default for zips and 7Zip was the default for rars, 7z, and everything else. I have no idea how that happened but I've corrected it. Thanks for the obvious suggestion!

Now I'm really interested to see if the problem pops up again or if this was the solution!