Solved Windows 11 Explorer - Quick access, Favorites, & Recent headings have disappeared.

In the navigation pane with Home selected, the headings for Quick access, Favorites, & Recent shown in the circled areas have disappeared. The individual files are lumped into one long list. There is no separation between types. How do I get these headings back? I have tried using the GUI to resolve the problem to no avail. I believe it may require changes to the registry.

CCLandfall35 said:

How do I get these headings back?

Click to expand...

Are the groups not expandable upon right click???

Some things to try...

Reset folder views:




Clear recent items:




Clear AutomaticDestinations and CustomDestinations:



Clear the registry keys that hold the saved folder views:

You can do that manually and restart Explorer, but it's easier to just run WinSetView. It does that every time you click Submit.


Windows Repair Install. It will keep your data, applications, and most settings:

OP marked it solved. All good, or what?

@CCLandfall35 Please tell us what you did to resolve the issue.

I reset the folders as LesFerch suggested and it worked. Thanks so much for the simple answer. It was about the only thing that I didn't try with the GUI.

This is an old thread but this issue came up for me recently on my Dell XPS. On the Home folder of Explorer the Quick Access & Favourites headings were suddenly missing, & while the pinned items added to Quick Access were present, they were were stuck in content view in a list, & the option to group by & sort by was completely missing on right clicking. Changing the view to tiles in the view option didn't change it from the content view. It was strange as the settings for Explorer were identical to the 9 other laptops here, all of which were functioning normally & displaying the Home view correctly.

I had already tried resetting the folder in the View tab in Options, and this did not work, neither did DSIM or SFCs. I then did a repair install via Windows Update, which in the past has fixed all things that rebooting & running DSIM commands didn't, however on opening explorer I was dismayed to see the same issue.

Some further scouring of help forums brought me to this thread, which hadn't appeared in previous searches. While resetting the folders as per LesFerch reply above (step 1) hadn't worked for me previously, it DID work after running a repair installation. So this is for anyone else who has developed this issue - try Reset Folder Views as per LesFerch's reply, even if you've tried it already, then resorted to a repair & it failed to fix it. I did not need to do any of the other steps in his reply.

There appears to be several threads around various tech forums about this exact issue, the bulk of which started between Nov 2023 & Feb 2024, however there were a few in the last 5 days as well, which is when I think it began for me.