I use Windows Vista for my sins, and one thing that was particularly frustrating recently was that simple act of right clicking. It seemed to take anything up to around a minute for the wretched context menu to appear in Windows Explorer, and finally I had had enough.
So I did a bit of hunting around and it seems that ‘Shell Extensions’ – little programs that affect the core functionality of the operating system, can balls things up big-stylee.
I found this incredibly useful application called ShellExView which once installed lets you browse these and disable them one by one.
If you click the ‘Type’ column you can then easily find all the ‘Context Menu’ shell extensions, and then right click and choose ‘Disable’. After disabling each in turn I tried right clicking in Windows Explorer to check the speed until the culprit was found.
The sinner turned out to be something to do with Macromedia Flash Paper viewer, and now I’m happily right clicking to my hearts content…