Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean that recall itself is actually doing recall stuff or even running a process (I haven’t checked if it does but not necessarily) like it would on a copilot laptop.

It is however very stupid that you can’t uninstall recall without messing up the file Explorer. My guess is that it’s a bug or some weird dependency needed with explorer.exe that handles the file explorer and a bunch of other stuff like the desktop and taskbar. It could also be spying but this seems like a stupidly obvious way to do it if they wanted too.