u/MandyKagami

Recently I decided to update chipset drivers for my machine after last updating it in mid 2025, the normal AMD installers would fail when trying to install chipset drivers so I downloaded the official separate chipset installer.
After doing the installation and rebooting, explorer.exe has been consistently crashing when I use folders with media in them, such as audio files or video, I can manually trigger it by either hovering with the mouse over the files or moving through the folder using the keyboard.
Normally I would just ignore it but I use this computer for work, I edit audio and video specifically in it so having my work folders crash randomly multiple times every day is considerably infuriating.
Explorer.exe does progressively freeze in each separate folder with media open as I use it, so it doesn't close or restart itself, it just hogs cpu resources indefinitely and makes the computer 10% or 20% slower PER FROZEN FOLDER, to the point where it makes UI responsiveness in other applications a slide show eventually despite the fact Task Manager reports only 6% usage of the CPU in the explorer.exe process. System Explorer confirms the percentages so I know Task Manager isn't lying in what it displays.
I have tried downgrading the chipset drivers but that has not solved the problem.
SFC Scannow with administrator level permissions still does nothing.
I have updates disabled at the group policy level so it is not windows swapping anything.

My specs are:
Windows 10 64bit
Gigabyte Aorus B450m
Ryzen 3700X
RX 9070XT (GPU driver version is 25.3.2 because it is the LAST ONE that works with the Adobe software that I use for work)
64GB of RAM