For the last couple of months I’ve been having a Windows problem, where if I right-click, delete, or try to open certain files, the window would freeze up and hang for a while. Not the whole system, just the window where the file was. It seemed like a Windows Shell problem. It was getting pretty frustrating, and Google wasn’t any help, and so I was at the point where I was ready to just format and reinstall. Not something I love to do, since it takes weeks to get the system back to the way it was. But things were just unusable.
So I figured that as long as I was reinstalling anyway, I should take the opportunity to muck around in the registry. After all, I didn’t have to worry about destroying anything, right? So I was poking around, and I kind of had an idea where to go, so I deleted a few keys here and there. Then I tried to open a file, and guess what? No lag time! No freezing! By blindly taking a machete to the Windows registry, I was actually able to fix the problem. So, I figure I should pass along the bits that I chopped out, in case it might help someone else. In any case, it will make Google a little bit smarter.
Open regedit.exe
, and go to the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex
. Underneath the shellex
key is another key named ContextMenuHandlers
. And underneath that is a list of crap that you’ll probably never use, a list of programs that get to look at every file you right-click on. I had things in the list like PowerArchiver and WinZip, and bunch of others that I’ve forgotten by now. The point is that I deleted all of them. All of them, at least, except for these three:
{a2a9545d-a0c2-42b4-9708-a0b2badd77c8}
Open With
Open With EncryptionMenu
On the first one, I’ve learned that whenever Windows doesn’t want you to touch something it gives it an ugly name like that. So I left it alone. And the other two seem to be related to the Open With submenu, which I definitely didn’t want to go away. Everything else was crap, so I deleted it. And you know what, it solved my problem. Now right-clicking and opening files is as fast as when I first loaded Windows, even though now things like WinZip are gone from the context menu when I right click. Which, actually, is a good thing.
So, if you’re in the same boat and on the verge of formatting, give that a try first. Sure, you can really bollocks up your system by mucking around in the registry too much. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can really fix things too.