After this PC was joined to the domain, changes made on network drives—such as renaming files or copying and pasting them—no longer appear immediately in File Explorer. The updated contents only show after manually refreshing the folder. Has anyone else seen this behavior, and is there a client-side setting or policy that can fix it?
2 Answers
A domain policy or workstation configuration may be introducing a short delay before SMB folder contents refresh. You can set DirectoryCacheLifetime under HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanWorkstationParameters to a DWORD value of 0. In PowerShell, an administrator can run: New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:SYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanWorkstationParameters" -Name "DirectoryCacheLifetime" -PropertyType DWORD -Value 0 -Force. This behavior appears to affect some Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 systems, while 23H2 reportedly refreshes normally.
This may be caused by the SMB directory metadata cache not updating promptly. One commonly suggested workaround is setting the client’s DirectoryCacheLifetime registry value to 0, which disables that cache and makes directory changes appear immediately. The change should be tested carefully, since caching normally helps reduce network traffic.
How do I disable that setting? Is it something I can change directly on the client?