Typical Microsoft! Disabling Windows Recall is Breaking File Explorer

Earlier this year, we were caught off-guard by Microsoft when they came up with a creepy move to spy on users with a new AI-powered feature called Recall.

When active, the feature takes snapshots of the screen a user is working on, to then catalog it, and serve for later fetching as a scrollable timeline. It was supposed to be disabled by default, but, it appears, Microsoft has gone back to enabling it by default.

The 24H2 release installs Recall on all PCs, not just Copilot+ PCs. But, that's not all. Recall also breaks an important Windows feature if someone tries to remove it.

Disabling Recall Breaks Important Functionality

a screenshot that shows an older-looking file explorer running on windows 11 — Source: InvisibleRasta

Even though there is now a way to uninstall Recall from Windows 11 PCs, Microsoft doesn't seem to have any plans to make the process an easy one.

Spotted by Chris Titus on a project he works on, a person posted their plight on the GitHub repo of Windows Utility (winutil). They explained how a Windows Pro 24H2 ISO created using MicroWin was downgrading the File Explorer to an older one.

If you didn't know, Windows Utility is a handy tool that helps people get rid of the unnecessary bloatware and features that a Windows release usually ships with. Similarly, MicroWin is used to create custom Windows images with tweaks according to one's preferences.

After some back and forth between the original poster and some contributors, it was found that Recall and Copilot were required to run the new File Explorer. Before you ask, the new one is the one that provides multi-tab functionality, and Copilot is an important component of Recall.

This was not the case with the 23H2 release, as Chris points out in his video. Microsoft has made this change in a very sneaky manner; the release blog for 24H2 (linked above) doesn't mention a single word about this.

To address the issue with File Explorer when using winutil or MicroWin, a contributor, CodingWonders, made some fixes, where the Recall components were kept intact and were disabled only after a user logged in.

But, for other users, this is something to be concerned about. If Microsoft is keeping Recall tied to an essential service like File Explorer, that too without talking about it anywhere, what else are they baking Recall into?

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