I stumbled upon a quirky icon while troubleshooting a user's slow file browsing issue on a Windows 11 machine. This user is experiencing delays when opening folders, especially from search results on specific network drives. I'd love to get some insights: what does this icon mean and what might cause the regular monitor icon to change to this one? The user's workstation is clean and new, connected to multiple mapped network drives across a few file servers, but it seems only this user's experiencing the problem. Just to clarify, when they search for files, results pop up quickly, but accessing them causes delays and brings up the icon in question, which you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/i3EQV0m. Any thoughts?
3 Answers
It’s possible that the icon indicates a connection issue, like being unable to reach the internet. Specifically, that icon might suggest it’s having trouble accessing external resources. You might want to check if IPv6 is enabled on the network interface card. Does the icon look the same as the one in the taskbar? Also, it could be related to a cloud storage setup, although you mentioned the issue seems specific to this user and the searches.
Is this user actually connecting to a network drive? It could be some network issue, but it’s weird that other network drives are fine. I'd look into that more since only this specific drive seems problematic.
Yes, it's definitely a network drive, but other drives aren’t showing this behavior. It's really confusing!
It sounds like that icon might be showing a network location that's pinned in Quick Access. I’ve seen a similar-looking icon that pops up when I access network locations like that. Maybe check if they have it pinned somewhere?
Thanks for the tip! I'll definitely check if it’s a pinned location.
The icon by the taskbar looks different, and it only appears when they’re opening folders from search results on that specific drive. Definitely not a cloud drive situation.