Right click not working on windows as administrator

[Guest]

Hi All,

I am using Windows XP home edition SP1. Since yesterday I am having a
strange problem. When I am logged on as administrator if I right click on the
desktop or any icon on the desktop the cursor changes into the hourglass and
Windows freezes. When I bring the mouse to the taskbar it changes into the
arrow but clicking on the taskbar or start button does nothing. I have to
press ctrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager to log off. Also when I right
click within an explorer window or click on the menu bar the program stops
responding. However I do not face this problem when I right click within a
program.

If I am logged on as a limited user I do not face this problem. Some days
previously I had edited the registry to get rid of a problem with disk
cleanup (KB812248). But the actual moment I noticed was just after installing
Firefox when I was dragging the install file to another location. I am
wondering if anybody else has faced a similar problem?

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm
http://www.winxptutor.com/sp2/divxcrash.htm
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootlist/208.htm#4

 

[Guest]

Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm
http://www.winxptutor.com/sp2/divxcrash.htm
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootlist/208.htm#4

Thanks for your help. The last link helped tremendously since it mentioned a
program I had installed recently "Eraser". Turns out that enabling background
entropy polling in eraser for generation of pseudorandom numbers causes the
freeze on right clicking. By disabling that option the problem went away.
This problem is documented at the eraser website at

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/faq.php#pc freeze

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Excellent! thanks for posting back.