Get rid of dead floating explorer context menu

Question

At some point I've right clicked in Explorer to open a file in Notepad++ and the context menu is left floating around on my screen.

• I've killed off both Explorer and Notepadd++ but the context menu remains.
• I've tried to drop the window identification target from Process Explorer on to it but Process Explorer doesn't seem to see it.

Its really annoying because I don't want to reboot at the moment and its hovering right over everything! Does anyone know how to kill these things off without a reboot?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Minimise all apps, then try the following:

• Change your screen resolution and then change it back.

• Run a full-screen app and then close it.

• Use your monitor's auto-adjust option if it has one.

Answer 2

I press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to bring up Task manager, then find dwm.exe in the processes and kill the process. In a second, the explorer interface comes back and the dead item is gone.

Answer 3

Floating CMs are annoying as hell and happen even in Xfce (GTK) here on my Debian desktop. However, the first technique I usually try used to work in Windows as well.

What I do is that I basically close them by Esc. However, that won't work if something else has the focus already, so now the tricky part is to get the focus on the menu without clicking an item in it:

1. Click a disabled item or a separator

   This is obviously not possible when there's no such item, or even when there's only one item as we can see on your screenshot.

2. Click and hold left ("the main") mouse button over the item, drag the mouse pointer off the item and release the button.

3. Press Esc