[wkat4242]

The unresponsive thing is because the whole explorer.exe still seems to be one big single threaded process. One thing hanging kills everything. Including stuff completely unrelated to the file manager like the task bar. So weird.

[dmitrygr]

> seems to be one big single threaded process

This option has existed since win2k IIRC:

Tools > Folder Options > View > Launch folder windows in a separate processed

[wkat4242]

I don't think that actually fixes the issue though. Perhaps there's some shared message queue that's blocking things? I don't know. I know I've had that on in the past and it didn't solve it.

[dmitrygr]

After enabling that, at most one single window hangs, not the entire explorer ui.

[philistine]

Whenever something is weird about Windows, it's for backwards compatibility reason. There must be no way to keep win32 and rewrite explorer.exe.

[solnyshok]

taskbar is very much related, it is an instance of explorer exe with some parameters, that makes it show as taskbar. Try killing explorer.exe in the task manager, when no other explorer windows is running.

[1718627440]

That's an implementation detail though. While I find that sensible, most users are not technical and still consider that to be unrelated and a bug.

[wkat4242]

Yeah it probably traces back to the time when Microsoft tied internet explorer into every part of the OS just so they wouldn't be forced to remove it.

They're really bad at modernising legacy parts of the OS. Even to this day parts of the old control panel exist and it's been like a decade that they've been working on it.

[1718627440]

> Even to this day parts of the old control panel exist

That is what keeps Windows usable though. I prefer them not the rip the last bits of sanity out.