Yes, you read that right.

I recently started experiencing a new problem with Microsoft Excel where it won’t close when I click on the application’s close button, but only if I opened it through Windows Explorer.

At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on because sometimes it would close properly, but yet other times it would remain open and simply closes the WorkBook.

After some testing, I finally realized what the root cause was: Windows Explorer!

Yes indeed, this issue stems from Windows Explorer’s Preview Pane. Whenever you have an Excel file in preview, then Excel will no longer close properly and will require clicking twice. If you turn off the preview pane, then everything operates perfectly fine.

Now this was not always the case, and I’ve tested in a couple older VMs that haven’t had Windows updated recently and the issue does not appear. However, on my main machine running Windows 22H2 (OS Build 19045.5011) the problem is there. So I highly suspect some recent Windows update broke things.