I’ve had a nagging issue lately that has really been bugging me.  Whenever I right click on a shortcut on my desktop, I get a 1-2 second lag before the context menu will pop out.  It wasn’t a “huge” deal so I put it off for a rainy day.  When I finally started trying to figure the problem out, I naturally resorted to Googling.  This is a case where Google couldn’t help.  There are too many results talking about generic right-click lag; or lag when you right click just on the desktop area.  My issue was a bit more specific; in that I was right clicking specifically on a shortcut.

I used procmon to determine that the nVidia drivers were making wild registry/file calls (big suprise, it’s nVidia’s driver).

I then started searching through context menu entries in the registry trying to make sense of how to resolve the issue.  I could fairly easily see how the layout worked, and that each file type had it’s own context menu entry set.  After some trial and error, needless reboots, and co-worker confirmation: These steps are confirmed to resolve the issue.  NOTE:  if you are not comfortable editing a system registry; make sure you take steps necessary to have appropriate backups (A good idea even if you are comfortable with regedit).

• Start, run/search, and type “regedit” minus the quotes
• Delete the key named “OpenGLShExt” from the relevant locations (I chose lnkfile and exefile respectively
  1. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\OpenGLShExt
  2. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\OpenGLShExt
  3. Make sure you delete the entire key; not just the default value within the key.

• If you notice right click lag on any other filetypes, as I did notice .bat, .msc, and a couple others; just repeat the same steps at that section of the registry. Maybe even get rid of ALL the references to this horrible key.
  1. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\OpenGLShExt

These keys were certainly causing the 1-2 second lag when I right clicked on shortcuts.  Once they were deleted, I instantly saw the lag disappear without even needing to reboot. Now hopefully Google can index this and try to help some other people out.  Since it took me about 5 hours total to get to this point.  🙂