Sunday, August 05, 2007

RE: Windows Shell Extensions Troubleshooting

On my work XP Pro laptop (and most of all our desktop systems) I have noticed a horrible right-click context menu appearance delay.

It might take up to one to two minutes at some times after right-clicking on an icon in Windows for the context-menu to appear.

I suspect it has something to do with the Novell items and doing something indexing or calling to network drives, but I haven't pinned it down yet.

I mention it only because I now have a tool to start troubleshooting this problem with.

It beings with AVG

I've been a long-time fan of AVG Free antivirus. There are a lot of good things going for it. Including the ability to right-click on a file in Windows Explorer and do a manual scan of the file or folder.

I always do that after downloading a file from the Net.

So recently after rebuilding my XP Home system from scratch, I decided to go ahead and install AVG Free Anti-Spyware as well. Another Grisoft product I have been very pleased with.

Now I noticed (and forums are filled with others as well) that in the right-click context menu, the AVG AntiSpyware item listed has a nice and pretty AVG icon next to it. However the AVG Anti-Spyware does not.

Hmmm.

After a full day's work playing with the registry and drag-netting the forums...seems no-one can figure out how to get a pretty AVG icon to appear in the context menu and that Grisoft has been aware of this "issue" for many years but hasn't felt it worth correcting.

Enter NirSoft

In the process, I re-discovered NirSoft's freeware utility "ShellExView" - Shell Extensions Manager.

This light and tiny utility allows you to display "...the details of shell extensions installed on your computer, and allows you to easily disable and enable each shell extension."

They also provided a link to a tutorial on how to resolve shell context menu issues: Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers.

So now I know what I need to do for my work pc's.

Just a matter of finding the time to do it.

--Claus

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