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
- HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\OpenGLShExt
- HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\OpenGLShExt
- 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.
- 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. 🙂
It may just be psychological, but it feels faster. I also found that same dubious key using ShellExView today. (Why do companies inject plugins that have a marginal benefit to perf ratio? ?)