Right-click menu is very slow

How to fix: Right-click menu is very slow to appear

Have you ever right-clicked on a file or a folder and had to wait for ages and ages before the Windows Context Menu opened up? You might also get the following error : “Windows has encountered a problem and needs to close…sorry for the inconvenience…” There might be no response when you right-click on a folder and try to get to its properties. If you are facing / have faced this problem, then it is due to bad Context Menu Handlers in your computer. It could be just one bad Context Menu Handler or many of them.

You can see examples of Context Menu Handlers in the image given below marked by the arrows:

Let’s try to figure out how to fix this problem:

You can fix this problem manually by editing the registry but that would be a lot more difficult (unless you are an experienced user). Lets look at the really easy way out – We need to download and install a small application called SHellExView from Nir Sofer – you can get it from their website.
Once you install this application in your computer and run it, it will display all the details of the installed shell extensions like description, company, filename, location, version etc… You can manually enable or disable any of these shell extensions. This feature is especially useful when you are dealing with Shell Extensions which are no longer used. These could have been created and left behind by programs which no longer exist on your computer. The ShellExView is a standalone executable and does not require any installation process or additional DLLs. Just copy it to any folder you want, and run it. After you run it, wait a few seconds until ShellExView loads all shell extensions items.

When you run SHellEXView, it scans your computers registry for all the existing shell extensions. Make sure you sort the results under the heading “Type” so that all the Context Menu Handlers can be viewed together. Now you will have to disable the non-Microsoft context menu handlers one by one and check if the issue has been resolved. Keep doing it until you identify the faulty Context Menu Handler. You could also disable multiple (non-Microsoft) context menu handlers at one go and check if that resolves the problem. At least you will be able to narrow down your search to a small group of Context Menu Handlers and it could save you that much time.