I have been encountering an issue with my Windows 11 machine where Windows Explorer has started processing very slowly or becomes completely unusable. To temporarily fix this, I need to either kill the process or restart the OS if it hangs entirely.

After some troubleshooting, I discovered that this issue only occurs with my HDD drive and not with my SSD drive. I suspect a recent Windows update might be the cause of this problem.

Has anyone else experienced this issue or have any solutions? Any insights or suggestions to permanently resolve this would be greatly appreciated.