This is a first for me. I have had many Radeon video cards throughout the years, but I have never had the graphics driver cause problems with Windows itself. A few weeks ago, I noticed that my computer would lock up, but only for certainly programs. Mostly browsers, Office apps and File Explorer. I eventually figured out after trial and error over a few days that if I double clocked my task bar while this lock up was happening, File Explorer would crash, restart and everything would start working again. I tried many different possible solutions including using some of the built in Windows 11 recovery tools, but nothing worked. After a couple weeks of just dealing with the issue, I noticed a pattern. It was happen consistently after my primary monitor was wake from sleep. I do not have hibernating turned on, so its very weird that a monitor going to sleep would cause File Explorer to crash. Quick search of that detail and it turns out that there are many problems with the latest "stable" Adrenaline driver release. Around the time that the problem had started, I had updated my graphics driver to 25.10.2, and never thought about it because why would my graphics driver cause this issue. I have since rolled back to 25.9.2, and the problem has fixed itself. Ive never had my AMD drivers cause an issue like this. Maybe I have been lucky, but it is such a strange interaction between the driver and the rest of the system. Hopefully they fix it soon, but I'll be fine on these drivers for now. Most of the enhancements in the latest driver don't affect the games that I have been playing.
Okay so I was apparently wrong to blame the issue on the graphics driver. The issue is back despite me being on 25.9.2. If anyone has any ideas I can try short of a fresh installation of Windows, which is my last resort. The problem started at some point after i updated to 25H2, but I"m not positive if its related or not. What will happen is after my monitor wakes from sleep, file explorer and my browsers will lock up and I get the blue spinning mouse cursor. It will stay locked up until i click on my task bar twice quickly, which will crash file explorer and it will reload and everything works fine. I'm dumbfounded by this issues.
I still have 25.10.2 and haven't noticed a significant problem so far. I've read it can cause chaos if you try to use ray tracing in games, though. I have it shut off on all the games I've been playing until they update it with a new driver.