By default, the Frequent Folders and Recent Files are grouped separately in the Quick Access (now known as “Home”) folder. Occasionally, on some systems, the Quick access view may appear incorrectly (e.g., the Frequent Folders and Recent Files items get mixed up and show under a single category) due to folder views corruption.
The following is the default Quick access folder view:
The following image depicts the problem where the frequent folders and recent files are grouped together.
Here is a variation of this problem, where the items are mixed up; they can neither be grouped separately nor be sorted by Type.
On Windows 11, the “Home” view may appear like below (i.e., the frequent folders and recent files are grouped under a single category named “Unspecified”) due to the corrupt folder view settings:
The items are grouped under a single category named “Unspecified”.
Resolution
To fix the Quick access (“Home”) view, close all folder windows except the one with the Quick access or Home view showing.
Important: Before following these steps, ensure you’re in the Quick Access (“Home”) view, and NOT in This PC view.
Right-click the Quick access star icon, and click Options.
Click the View tab, and click Reset Folders
Click OK when you see the following prompt:
Do you want to reset all folders of this type to the default view settings?
This resets the folder views for Quick access (in Windows 10) and “Home” (in Windows 11). The above steps will not reset the customizations for other folders.
If the above steps don’t help, reset the folder views completely (for all folders) using the method described in the article How to Reset Folder Views.
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Perfection Xplanation, Ramesh… would never have found the fix without your help, sir!
AlUmLtd
@Alex: YW and thanks for the feedback.
brilliant – microsoft buggered up my pc after 1809 update,
Tip if PC slow replace HDD with SSD – mine now 15 secs and its ready
Thanks
Do you know what causes this error to occur? It has only recently started happening to me.
Ramesh is very grateful for your help, Ramesh blesses you.
happens ever day repeatedly for me, not sure why or how, at least i can temporarily fix it now
You saved me! This is the only article I could find that explained how to fix this problem with my Quick Access folder. I wonder why Windows 10 does this?
Happens randomly every day here too (1909)
Thank you very much
Thanks so much 🙂
PERMANENT FIX
If this bug for you occurs repeatedly every day, after you clicked button “Reset Folders” as shown above in the article, do this additional step: click also “Apply to Folder” to save it as the default view for this kind of folder.
It should fix it permanently and shouldn’t happen anymore from my personal experience!
Excellent and succinct solution. Thank you!
Thank you. The steps to do this little change, seems easy…. But turns that if you don’t execute the right options… you change things that you do not expect to change.. Again thanks
It doesn’t work for me.
@Zayn: Were you in the Quick access folder view before accessing the Folder Options? Also, can you post a screenshot?
Thank you so much for this. It really helped me a lot!
Thanks a lot for this hint. I still have no idea how I ended up in this situation in the first place, but at least I was able to get out of it again. Some aspects of Microsoft Windows are strange.
OMG! Thank you so much! So easy, I tried cmd and everything, nothing worked, but this!
Brilliant! It’s so easy … once you know it. Apparently the “Quick Access” view can break in multiple ways, so a search engine will often yield unsuitable results, but this tip of yours helped me in my particular case.
Thanks Ramesh! This works but keeps happening. It seems to happen each time Microsoft updates Win 10 but I’m not really sure that’s it.
thanks!
thank you so so so much