Not to hijack your thread but contribute to it. I, too, am a victim of what I believe to be the explorer bug mentioned
HERE that Microsoft admits but has not officially addressed.
See the part that says "
Explorer.exe is still crashing for some people
A bug that crashes explorer.exe when rebooting Windows was first reported in KB5034204 (January 2024 Update) and is still present in the February 2024 optional update.
Is this what you are experiencing? This is also happening to me
at times.
1. Occasionally, during normal operation explorer will hang when I'm doing random tasks and I have to force restart explorer. I do not remember what build I was on when this started but I believe it was with after 23h2. I restored back to my last image of 22h2 and ran for 2 weeks with no problems. I then restored back to my first image of 23h2 which worked but issues began after the first cumulative was applied...again happening randomly.
2, When I use restart from power menu, restart process will begin but just hang in restarting state with black screen with no indication on screen of apps that are preventing restart. There is no option to "restart anyway". This forces me to do a hard shutdown. Shutdown is not affected by this. This may happen several times a week or may go weeks without happening. I have found that if I restart explorer just before restart, restart will always work.
3. I have done all troubleshooting I can think of up to to but not including a repair install. SFC, DISM restore health, power options to default, fast startup off, safe mode, disabled startup apps. Because it is so random, clean boot has not been of benefit in a resolution.
I restart so seldom, I've lived with the killing explorer workaround before restart or using shutdown for now. I hesitated doing a repair install after reading that it was a known problem for some.
www.elevenforum.com
