Do me a favor, find a file in Explorer and right-click on it. If you are like most users, you’ll have at least a handful of 3rd party programs injected into the context sensitive right-click popup. I install a lot of different programs on my computer, some of which have a habit of polluting this popup with all their various options. Granted, the installers probably provide a way to opt-out of this integration if I had taken more time to poke around in the options. Mea culpa.
I enjoy a clean, stream-lined system and while some of the integration in the right-click menu is handy – like say your anti-virus software – most of it probably isn’t! You may be interested in knowing that having a lot of programs in this popup can actually delay the visual response time – the time you right-click to the time the options are actually displayed. Now, we aren’t talking seconds, but it’s one of those little things that help in providing a snappy and speedy experience in any interface.
So what can you do about it? Well, thankfully this problem is solvable and it centers around our good friend, the Windows Registry.
- Click Start and in the Start Search box type regedit.exe
- Traverse the Registry Editor navigation tree on the left hand side down to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\
- If you expand the ContextMenuHandlers tree you will be presented a list of folders. These are actually the applications that show up in your right-click menu. At this point you have two options to remove the application; either delete the folder here, or alternatively just disable it – which provides an easier way to re-enable the functionality.
- To disable the application, select it in the left hand panel. Now in the right hand panel, right click on the key and choose Modify.
- Finally, add a minus (-) before the key value and click OK to apply the change.
- Refresh your Explorer window and right-click on the file again, noticing that the application has been removed from the popup. If you want to re-enable the application functionality, return to the key above and remove the minus.
It’s actually that easy! You may also be interested in adjust the behavoring of right-click on Folders. It’s the same process as above but instead you should navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\.
