Windows Explorer not populating: Multiple users

[SmittyIT]

Hey Folks,

I work as an IT Assistant in an office. We have been having a sporadic issue with multiple users (myself included) where Windows File Explorer just hangs and does not populate. All of our machines are running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

What happens is a user will open up computer to navigate their local/network drives and nothing will populate, no network or local drives will show. The left side navigation pane will show only Favorites, Libraries, and Computer with nothing listed under them. There will be the green loading bar crawling slowly at the top and it will finish to no avail. Users can still navigate to drives/folders if they manually type in a directory or use a shortcut to a specific directory. If they use a shortcut that opens a new file explorer window the left navigation panel will be fully populated with drives but the other window will continue to hang.

I have run a chkdsk on my computer as I have had the issue and it returned no errors.

My temporary solution is Task Manager > End Explorer.exe > Run Explorer.exe

 

[Samsies]

I am all of a sudden having the same issue with multiple users. I wonder if this could be a bad Windows Update that went out...

I have a batchfile that ends and restarts explorer.exe that I have put out as a band-aid to the situation but it is NOT a solution...

Re-imaging 40 machines also doesn't seem like an ideal solution.....