Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Removing Context Menu Entries in Windows

If you install a lot of programs, you may find that your context menu (the list that appears when you right-click) has a bunch of junk on it or takes a few seconds to load. Fortunately, it's pretty simple to clean up the global context menu.

Open regedit with Windows+R "regedit" and accept the UAC confirmation. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, then the folder whose name is a single asterisk "*", then "shellex", then expand the folder names "ContextMenuHandlers". Every subfolder (subkey) of that is one program's group of entries that shows up on your context menu everywhere. Simply right-click and choose Delete on an entry to remove it. (If there is an entry that looks like a mash of hexadecimal characters in curly braces, some app developer tried to register entries manually and misunderstood how this key works. Those entries can be deleted.)

Fun fact: using the .NET Framework in a context menu handler is a great way to produce insane slowdowns whenever the user right-clicks. Developers, please don't. .NET is great - I love it - but loading the CLR takes what is an unacceptable length of time for right-click responsiveness.

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