J
JClark
Hello Group:
I'm taking the liberty of reposting my response to a series of
questions about loss of context menu-right click functionality. There
are a lot of "solutions" to what seems to be a common problem. When I
posted my response, I was to tired to realize that the message I was
replying to was very old, hence this update for those who may need
some advice.
original message:
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Hello Don:
Thanks for posting such a nice overview of what seems to be a common
problem, as I found during my own search. You requested posting of
what does not work, but I'll take the liberty of posting what did work
for me. My experience is added here for whatever it may add to the
body of knowledge which is forming.
I had just put together a new system with some fairly old parts and an
OEM windows XP OS. After installing a number of my favorite programs,
I noted suddenly that the right mouse click for context in Windows
Explorer led to a perpetual hourglass, requiring reboot, or multiple
efforts at logging off. I had trouble even copying the shellexview
file because right click didn't work, and neither did highlighting the
file with left click and using "edit" because clicking "edit" locked
up the box as well. So I just ran shellexview from a USB memory
device, having downloaded it from another functioning (W2K) computer.
I found my own solution with ShellExView. The nirsoft website is hard
to get to for some reason.
http://www.nirsoft.net
The overview of the shell context handler problem is here:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm
What shellexview does is to list all the registry entries which have
to do with the context menu shell handlers. You can disable them
....they say "one at a time" and see what effect it has on the problem.
I did it a lot quicker by bisecting the list, disabling half of the
entries in one fell swoop, rebooting and trying the right click on a
desktop shortcut. It worked, so I knew I just had to narrow it
down...just as we used to do with msconfig. Then I kept bisecting the
list until it was just a few and did those one at a time. The problem
is that you have to reboot between tries to get accurate testing of
the results of your disablings. I didn't find logging off to be
consistent.
My problem shell context handler turned out to be "eraser"...I
installed an older version which may not have been OK for XP.
Tolvanen, by the way, who wrote eraser, stopped supporting it and now
it is handled by
www.heidi.ie/eraser/
and their version 5.7 does work with XP.
Good luck to all with this frustrating problem.
Jack
I'm taking the liberty of reposting my response to a series of
questions about loss of context menu-right click functionality. There
are a lot of "solutions" to what seems to be a common problem. When I
posted my response, I was to tired to realize that the message I was
replying to was very old, hence this update for those who may need
some advice.
original message:
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Hello Don:
Thanks for posting such a nice overview of what seems to be a common
problem, as I found during my own search. You requested posting of
what does not work, but I'll take the liberty of posting what did work
for me. My experience is added here for whatever it may add to the
body of knowledge which is forming.
I had just put together a new system with some fairly old parts and an
OEM windows XP OS. After installing a number of my favorite programs,
I noted suddenly that the right mouse click for context in Windows
Explorer led to a perpetual hourglass, requiring reboot, or multiple
efforts at logging off. I had trouble even copying the shellexview
file because right click didn't work, and neither did highlighting the
file with left click and using "edit" because clicking "edit" locked
up the box as well. So I just ran shellexview from a USB memory
device, having downloaded it from another functioning (W2K) computer.
I found my own solution with ShellExView. The nirsoft website is hard
to get to for some reason.
http://www.nirsoft.net
The overview of the shell context handler problem is here:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm
What shellexview does is to list all the registry entries which have
to do with the context menu shell handlers. You can disable them
....they say "one at a time" and see what effect it has on the problem.
I did it a lot quicker by bisecting the list, disabling half of the
entries in one fell swoop, rebooting and trying the right click on a
desktop shortcut. It worked, so I knew I just had to narrow it
down...just as we used to do with msconfig. Then I kept bisecting the
list until it was just a few and did those one at a time. The problem
is that you have to reboot between tries to get accurate testing of
the results of your disablings. I didn't find logging off to be
consistent.
My problem shell context handler turned out to be "eraser"...I
installed an older version which may not have been OK for XP.
Tolvanen, by the way, who wrote eraser, stopped supporting it and now
it is handled by
www.heidi.ie/eraser/
and their version 5.7 does work with XP.
Good luck to all with this frustrating problem.
Jack