The explorer is divided into the following areas:
Explorer Navigation Pane missing in Windows 11/10
Sometimes, your Windows Explorer may not display the left-side Navigation Pane properly or may appear all grayed out – a possible reason could be file or registry corruption. What do you do under such circumstances? Well, you may try this:
1] Run System File Checker
Run sfc /scannow to run the system file checker.
2] Re-register the shdocvw.dll file
You may need to re-register the shdocvw.dll file which is used by Windows to add some basic file operations. The shdocvw.dll file is a system file that helps perform the navigation, history maintenance, favorites maintenance, HTML parsing, etc. So see if re-registering this dll file helps you resolve the issue. Open an elevated command prompt, type the following and hit Enter:
3] Check the Navigation pane setting
In Windows 11, to heck, if you have by mistake unchecked the option to show the Navigation Pane, click on View > Show.
Select Navigation pane there if it is unchecked. If you are using Windows 10/8, you may want to check if you have by mistake unchecked the option to show the Navigation Pane.
Open File Explorer > View tab > Navigation pane > Ensure that the option to show Navigation pane is checked. I hope something helps!
