Speed Up Windows Right Click Menu with ShellExView

By Josh | June 12, 2008

Recently, I have been having trouble with my right click context menu in Windows Vista. It would take forever to load when I would right click on a file or folder. The right click menu would work fine in other programs, but when right clicking a file or folder in Windows, it would take a lot longer than normal to load. I figured that the reason for this was because many programs that I had installed had inserted their own entry into the context menu. I didn’t want to have to go through and uninstall each of these programs since I still wanted them installed.

An easy way to take care of a slow right click context menu is to download and install ShellExView. ShellExView will show you all kinds of different information, but the info that I was interested was just the “Context Menu” entries under Type. If you go through each of these entries and disable them, you can figure out which one is causing the problem. Don’t disable any that have to do with Microsoft or Windows. I ended up disabling half of them first to see if that solved the problem. In order to see the changes you’ll either have to restart Windows, or just restart explorer.exe. Here is a great guide on restarting explorer.exe in Vista the easy way.

You may want to narrow it down to the one entry that is causing the problem and then re-enabling the rest of the entries, but I ended up just clearing out all of the entries that I didn’t need. Now my right click menu is a lot faster. There were a few entries that I couldn’t find in ShellExView to disable. An example would be the RegToy entry, which I guess I could just uninstall since I don’t use it, but it would be nice to just disable it. At least now I don’t have to wait for a minute to see my right click menu.