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I have a new Windows 7 box and I'm seeing some weird behaviour in the Start Menu. The menu itself looks fine: there are Recent Items and Pinned Items. If I left click on any item it opens as expected. If I right click on any item, I get a context menu. All good so far.
The issue starts when I try to select anything in the context menu. Nothing works. If I try to select "Open" or "Run as administrator"... nothing. As I said, left click works just fine.
One other thing is that some of the Recent Items have a right arrow next to them that let you open the program with additional context. For example, Excel lets you select to open recent files. Remote Desktop will let you open recent connections. None of this works for me, either. I left click on a Word document or Remote Desktop connection in this way and it appears to just ignore me.
I should also mention that this is only a problem in this initial view of the Start Menu. If I click "All Programs" to get to the more detailed program listing view, then the right click context menu works as expected.
I'm at a bit of a loss for how to even go about troubleshooting this problem. Is there any way to get more visibility into what is happening here?
1As a troubleshooting step: Create a second account, log in as that person and see if the problem is still there.
This sort of thing is usually the result of bugs in Explorer add-ins, also known as "Shell Extensions". There is a free utility, "ShellExView", from NirSoft that lets you view and manage (disable and enable) these things. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2014-11-06T02:14:50.877
ShellExView is brilliant. I used enable/disable and process of elimination to narrow down the problem to a Perforce context menu extension. Disabling that makes the problem go away (and also makes the context menu in Explorer show up instantaneously instead of after 3 or 4 seconds). Awesome! – Scott Cameron – 2014-11-06T20:05:14.137
Thanks for the feedback! I will post this as an answer, please approve it :) – Jamie Hanrahan – 2014-11-06T20:20:29.650