Problem:
Right-clicking a file or folder in Vista in order to see the properties or perform an additional action was causing explorer.exe to stop responding and attempt in vain to restart. This is beyond annoying and plagued my vista installation for hours. Obviously something in the context menu (the little menu that pops up when your right-click) was not behaving.
The fix:
Normally, in order to see the shell extensions that are running one could use ShellExView, sort the view by type, disable all the context menu process one by one, trying to right-click a file in explorer each time until you disable the offending extension.
Vista however, needs ShellExView to run as an administrator and I could not right-click ShellExView in order to run this program with elevated rights, so…. catch22 situation there.
So to i had to do it the manual way: I opened Regedit and backed up the following keys:
HKCR \*\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\AllFileSystemObjects\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Folder\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Directory\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\shellex\contextmenuhandlers
HKCR\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
Then went through each one, deleting the sub-keys one by one till i disabled the dodgy shell extension.
Each time I deleted a subkey, I’d reopen windows explorer, right click a file and if it bombed, i’d delete the next subkey and repeat the process. Once I found the offending process, I re-imported the .reg files I’d created when backing up the keys then I deleted just the sub-key that was the issue.
In my case it was a FGMenu.dll which I suspect is for a fingerprint-reading USB Key i use fairly often.
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