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I am also interested in Win11 Pro’s Group Policy holding at Win11 22H2, for example. Is that just a reliable as InControl?

Catching up… SMART data and CHKDSK were happy with the drive.

The link didn’t want to work, but it led me in the right direction, and I have iCloudSetup.exe version 7.21.0.23. The app store version is 14.2, so I’m not sure what all of those versions did or didn’t do. It’s in my back pocket in case I get the urge to purge the app store version and reload this.

One thing came to mind: Today’s Ask Woody Plus had an article about big changes (removing new features, it seems) from File Explorer. Has anyone heard rumors about these changes being bad?

It looks like you’re running the “real” applications. I ended up loading the silly apps from the Microsoft Store. Attached is how they’re identified.

I’ll do those checks soon, for good measure. However, the issues seem to come and go with enabling/disabling the five startup tasks related to Apple iCloud for Windows. What changed a couple weeks ago is a puzzle, but there are other complaints relating to this, so more to come.

Frustrating… my mobile world is iOS/iPadOS, so I hope the answer is out there.

I completed the reinstall described in the link. The good news is that I didn’t require the backup image I made before the attempt. However, the behavior is the same: a very busy Windows Explorer task and the inability to restart or shutdown normally.

I’m repeating the clean boot elimination like I did last year (2022) when I found dropbox to be the apparent cause. Any other ideas are very welcome.

Thanks. Screenshot attached.

Another behavior that is back from before is need to manually refresh Windows Explorer to display file changes (on Desktop, too). It doesn’t want to shutdown, either.

This old issue has not recurred (though sometimes it takes longer than expected to respond). Thanks.

The hard wired line has done wonders (of course). Now with a new fiber connection, even better. Thanks.

Nearly a week and my antique PC is still purring. I guess Dropbox was somehow hammering Windows Explorer and a bit of dust in the fan allowed it to heat up more than it should. Thanks for the responses.

Poked around about windows explorer using a lot of CPU. Ended up disabling all non-Microsoft services and <magic> no more problems. I then enabled them in groups until all that remained disabled was Dropbox. Funny thing: re-enabling Dropbox didn’t bring my symptoms back. Nevertheless, since I have not used Dropbox for a few years, I uninstalled it. Right now everything is running great: all shutdown and restart paths work, changes on the desktop and in File Explorer windows refresh properly, and Windows Explorer is back at <1% CPU.

Now, what was Dropbox actually doing to me? No idea. I think I’ll let that one go.

Thanks to everyone to popped in with ideas!

2 users thanked author for this post.

Coldheart9020, Fred

Shutdown seemed to work today (at least the command line version) so it’s sporadic (or magically fixed itself). I ran dism/sfc and it found and corrected something (and nothing apparent in the CBS.log it sends me to–maybe some owned twice entries, but nothing much else). The big symptom at the moment is explorer. I still need to press F5 to see any file changes, either in a window or on the desktop. In task manager, two curiosities: While doing nothing, “Windows Explorer” is running at 18% of CPU and “Very high” power usage. I tried to kill and restart it and the desktop went blank but the task remained in task manager. Tried to start explorer.exe and nothing happens.

I cleaned out the laptop, though it was surprisingly clean–just a very thin layer of fine dust on surfaces. It turns out that this laptop (an old HP Pavilion dv7-6c95dx) has heat pipes between the fan housing and two chips (CPU & ?). So any fins must be inside the fan housing? But it’s all clean inside now, and the fan housing received a good dose of air to clear the fins that must be inside. Everything turns freely. The filter screens on the bottom are all clean for incoming air to get to the fan. I don’t see temperatures higher then the low 70s C now and the fan has yet to crank up to the flat-out speed I saw before. A video I found showed removing the MB and replacing the thermal paste between the chips and the heat pipe. Is that a real thing? (Well, the old beast is about 11 years old.)

Since this, Start>Restart and [command line] shutdown usually work, but Start>Shutdown seems to fail. And then there is the File Explorer refresh problem. It has worked sometimes (copying a file to the desktop, saving from a program to the desktop, etc.) but then it will stop, requiring F5. Is it time for “Reset this PC”?

And yes, I’m in the market to replace the old friend, but I’d really like to get this sorted–call it an educational experience.

Thanks for the info. Core Temp says Tj. Max is 100 C, so yeah, 90 is getting up there. I’ll add cleaning the dust to my list. Meanwhile, I did get a normal shutdown, once. When I checked on it everything was cooler and after restarting the fan was behaving: speed up a little, slow down again. Maybe accumulated dust and running 24 hours trying to shutdown got things hot.

Also, after that normal shutdown, my file explorer (and desktop) issue–where nothing refreshed without pressing F5–fixed itself. All I did was powercfg -restoredefaultschemes, which selected something called “unbundle” that I have not seen before. I fiddled with some settings and a Restart ran for 20+ minuites before I gave up and forced shutdown. But the next power up is the one time the Shutdown worked. Now it’s not working again.

I’m going to tackle the dust issue next. Maybe it’s just heat? (That would be embarrassing.)

Yes, Fast Start is off. (At least the checkbox in the GUI is empty.) Thanks.

Thanks for the hint, I’ll have to check into it. However, yesterday–after a week of having to find Ctrl-Alt-Del to unlock the PC–it returned to normal. A tap of Esc or any other key now does the deed as before.

Thanks again for the replies.