Windows 10: Windows 10 sooooo sluggish in Windows Explorer...

The slowness of Win 10 when navigating in Windows Explorer is unbearable. Why is that little blue wheel always spinning? Is it indexing something, searching for something or caching something?

I click to expand "This PC" and have to wait for 10-15 seconds -- why?

I found some silly service called "Quick Access" or something like that. Can I turn it off? Is there anything else that can be slowing it down that I can turn off? It's constantly chugging away at something - don't know what.

It's displaying the text "Working on it". Just discovered that it's still "working on it after I wrote this entire post".
I still can't see the drives.

:)

 

Windows 10 Desktop Slideshow Speed Minimum Time Increased from 10 Seconds to One Minute

[Replying to myself] I'll add that the Win Home PC that crashed it's Windows Explorer is shuffling +or- 45,000 photos... The Win 10 Pro PC is only dealing with 7,000 or so, but will still manifest the sluggishness I described eventually.

 

Personalising 'File Explorer' Environment and Display (Text Size Etc.)

The Office 365 technical team has figured out how to optionally darken the ribbon background to improve readability, so it can be done.

Sooooo Windows File Explorer team ... "make it so"

Thanks..

 

Possible cause(s):

• If there's any extra USB HD device connected, temporaily disconnected.
• Disk drive is corrupted. Run chkdsk /r C: from Admin command. Reboot required and will take a while to run.
• System file(s) corrupted. From admin command, copy and paste then run:
  Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup&dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth&sfc /scannow&pause
• Incompatibbe Shell Extension(s), try this link:
  Solved File Explorer crashes after Right Click in Desktop - Windows 10 Forums

 

This is apparently a known bug. The performance is much better if permanently disabling Defender and Search Indexer and some other junk service that's running in the background. But. really - that shouldn't be necessary. If somebody reads this who is affected by this problem and is moderately computer literate - start with googling for stuff to turn off.

The problem is worst when clicking "This PC" in Windows Explorer. It takes several minutes for Windows to figure out that there are 6 disks connected to this PC. It took under one second in flipping Windows XP or earlier.

 

I'm doing some more work on this before I mark it closed.

Here is an example of the many instances of people having this problem

(Icons going "white" or blank seems to be a related problem. I'm having that too.

File Explorer - then stops responding windows 10
All Icons Become Blank windows 10 - Windows - How-To Geek Discussion
https://forums.techguy.org/threads/issues-with-win-10-file-explorer.1153045/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/c...y&sh=12bb6b4e*