14 DAY TRIAL // A growing number of users who upgraded their Windows 10 systems to April 2018 Update manually is now reporting a bug causing explorer.exe to crash repeatedly.
While it’s not yet clear what’s causing the issue, symptoms are pretty much the same in all cases: the explorer process crashes at random times, and while it restarts automatically, another crash follows shortly after that.
Users whose machines are impacted by the problem are discussing the problem on reddit and on Microsoft’s Community forums, and by the looks of things, Windows Timeline might be the feature to blame.
Windows Timeline is a new tool in Windows 10 April 2018 Update that allows users to restore their activity to any point within the last 30 days using cloud synchronization. When enabled, this feature allegedly causes an explorer.exe crashes during the synchronization process.
Possible workaround
According to some users, fixing this bug comes down to disabling Windows Timeline. To do this, go to Settings > Privacy > Activity History and set the option called Let Windows sync my activities from this PC to the cloud to off.
While some believe the bug might be in some way tied to GPU drivers, others indicate that even disabling Windows Timeline from the Settings app doesn’t make any difference because the feature actually isn’t turned off completely.
Others claim that it’s all happening because the user folder on Windows is corrupted and migrating data to a new user account could be the solution. The bug was spotted in preview builds shipped as part of the Windows Insider program, and it reportedly exists in Redstone 5 builds released for the Skip Ahead ring as well.
Microsoft hasn’t yet acknowledged the bug, but with Patch Tuesday projected to happen this week, a cumulative update for Windows 10 April 2018 Update that would include several fixes is also likely to land.