Comment by raggi

explorer.exe is both the shell and the file explorer which is an unfortunate state of affairs.

There's long been an option to make it multi-process, but the cost of that option has increased with every release since 95. If I remember correctly, back in the 95 days that would spawn a new explorer process per window.

These days, probably since tabs or so, when you check this option it spawns exactly one other process, even for many windows. The second process has over 100 threads, the shell process normally spawns around 40 when you open a window, only 20 of which exit immediately when you close the window, the rest stick around for fairly arbitrary periods of time.

Note though about 2/3rds of the threads on my system are rooted in the nvidia driver thunks, I really don't know why so many - is it a side effect of the xaml port?

anyway, no idea what the preloading exactly will be doing, but it does sound like a hack over debt. it'd feel better if there was more process isolation being added to the desktop environment, but you know, it's an old desktop OS, so if one window wants to screw with another window, YOLO! On the flip side making stuff like komorebi is trivial on the platform and there is some nicety to that as long as you trust everything you ever run.