Started having the same problem but only on desktop & quicklaunch. XP pro sp2 not on a domain. Tried lots of things that in retrospect were rather non-sensical - especially the solutions from MS! Anyway, some program or other did a lousy job of un/installing the shell extension context menu handler. So after wasting hours editing the registry I did a "find" for context and right there in HKCR "*" was some dumb program that isn't on the computer anymore. DUH! So when I'd right-click it would read the HKCR:* and - of course it would take forever to find - nothing! deleted the non-existant program and bingo! Right-click context is alive and well. Hope this helps. BTW it was Roxio.
August 15, 2008 at 11:51 AM
I've tried shellex, shellnew, tweakui, and a whole host of other things that wouldn't fix a freeze or hang when trying to do a New context menu, either in right-click, new, or File, new.
Then I found it worked on another logon. That was enough for me.
For non-domains, it's pretty obnoxious, but you can simply create a new user and transfer stuff between old and new. Outlook Express is in a special case.
For domains, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. An admin can go in and in this particular case probably move or rename the ntuser.dat for the affected user so the user can get a new profile. Once that is accomplished, it should be rather trivial to move favorites, etc. If the old user folder was in c:\documents and settings\username, the new user folder will be in c:\documents and settings\username.domain.
Hope this helps someone. At least it prevented me from having to do a full reinstall of OS.
"Right-click, New freeze in XP"
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Started having the same problem but only on desktop & quicklaunch. XP pro sp2 not on a domain.
Tried lots of things that in retrospect were rather non-sensical - especially the solutions from MS!
Anyway, some program or other did a lousy job of un/installing the shell extension context menu handler. So after wasting hours editing the registry I did a "find" for context and right there in HKCR "*" was some dumb program that isn't on the computer anymore. DUH! So when I'd right-click it would read the HKCR:* and - of course it would take forever to find - nothing! deleted the non-existant program and bingo! Right-click context is alive and well. Hope this helps.
BTW it was Roxio.
August 15, 2008 at 11:51 AM