Doc's Computin' Tips: Removing context menu entries

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Friday, March 12. 2010

Doc's Computin' Tips: Removing context menu entries

Pic: Average student at Dr. Mercury's Computer School For Unwed Mothers upon discovering that a program she's just installed has added YET ANOTHER entry to the damb context menu!

P.S. I sure wish I had a lip ring. :(

On a Windows system, the 'context menu' is what pops out when you click on an icon with the right mouse button. Unfortunately, programs like installing their own entries on the context menu and things can get a bit cluttered after a while.

The solution is to use a simple program called ShellExView to remove the unwanted entries.

A download site is here. No need to install, just unzip and copy the folder to a permanent home. Then open the ShellExView folder, grab hold of the program's icon and d-r-a-g it over to the Start Menu and drop it in for future access.

Fire up the program and look for the company or program name on the left. Right-click on it and select 'Disable'. Go find an icon, right-click on it and see if the entry has been removed. If not, look for another entry by the same company or program. It should be there somewhere.

Posted by Dr. Mercury in Dr. Mercury's Computer Corner, Our Essays at 15:35 | Comments (13) | Trackbacks (0)

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Doc's Computin' Tips: Index
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I predict the model will be unsatisfied with middle age.

#1 buddy larsen on 2010-03-12 16:18 (Reply)

Every time I see someone like that, I want to tell them "Be sure to take plenty of pictures of yourself. You're going to want to look at them later on in life. Promise."

#1.1 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2010-03-12 16:39 (Reply)

Ahhh, the follies of youth. I'm glad I was talked out of the tattoo by older and wiser heads when I was in the Navy so many moons ago. On the up side of that, I've seen some really nice tramp stamps on a few hot chicks, and I always wonder what those will look like when they're sixty.

#1.2 JoeC on 2010-03-12 17:46 (Reply)

I have one - right shoulder and I have it touched up ever five years or so.

Eagle/Globe and Anchor w/USMC in a banner under.

The only one I ever wanted and the only one I ever got. :>)

#1.2.1 Tom Francis on 2010-03-12 19:54 (Reply)

Pretty cool - but I don't have anything when I right click other than AVG, Photoshop CS4 and something else I use regularly.

I wonder why because I have plenty of software on this beastie.

#2 Tom Francis on 2010-03-12 19:56 (Reply)

Conversation w/ the model;

Q: "Why are you like this?"
A: "Because i'm angry!"
Q: "Why are you angry?"
A: "Because I'm like this!"

#3 buddy larsen on 2010-03-12 20:23 (Reply)

What would you do with a lip ring?

I'm gonna tell some stuff that Ol' Doc ain't much gonna agree with. Now, don' get me wrong, I don' profess to be a foremost expert or even an early adopter. But once upon a time I knew my Unix systems. Especially what passed in the day for LARGE unix systems. I made 'em hum. Been accused of cheating on benchmarks several times. Never did. Never lost one. Multiple SMP systems chomping on shared disk farms... we didn't call 'em NAS or SAN or any such thing back then, we just figgered out what the data looked like and sliced and diced accordingly.

Compouters are WAY faster now and every mother's son thinks they know RAID and SANs like they know their siblings. Mebbe they do.

A while back some folks started yapping 'bout "utility computing". Toasters make your bread melt your butter for you whether you know about ohms or not. Same with lightbulbs- flip the switch and you can see down the hallway whether or not you ever heard of a phreakin photon.

Grandma didn't need to know anything about the science or technology of TV to watch it. Don't need to know a piston from a poopdeck or steam drive from a stem cell to drive your laundry to the dry cleaner.

I loved the sound of those ideas. The notion that I wouldn't have to spend 10 hrs a day reading and fussing and testing to keep up with making computers go fast just seemed like heaven on earth to me. But it also seemed impossible.

The MS Windows came along. And slowly but surely the world forced me to use it and I learned to HATE computers and LOVE the idea of utility computing. For every good thing a Windows driven machine might do for you, you need to learn about 3 or 6 ways to make sure that thing doesn't take control of, or othewise wreck your computer. It's enough to drive a person away from computers.

The other day - really, just this week - a couple guys came in and after listening to them a few minutes I realized they were trying to recruit me to into a "task force". Oh shit. What problem are you yahoos trying to solve? Well, they went on about this and that and them and these and there seemed no end to the horror inflicted upon them. Along the line it slowly became apparent to me that the nature of the problem was that new requirements placed upon the operational IT systems were bringing it to its knees.

Wow! That ain't good. We're a small company. That's some pretty healthy racks of servers and storage we have out there and I ain't hooked into IT but I've heard tell of your plans for the "next phase" and, umm... how can you not have enough compute power?

Someone was axeing themto add 200,000 new entries into the product database. WTF? We're not adding 200K products, whassup? Well, a distributor wouldn't sift their product DB for us. If we wanted the few hundred part numbers we were interested in we'd have to eat their whole DB (they are a major distributor for who knows how many companies - we only care about two of maybe 300 and the ones we care about have relatively narrow product lines).

Anyway, 200K records... bummer.

But back to me. So, umm... guys. 200K is a lot but whattaya want from me? Just have the computers sift through that crap.

Well, we can barely keep the things running as it is. If we add these 200K records we'll have over 3.6M...

WHAT?!?!? (I sometimes get more agitated than I should.) First off, why on earth do we have 3.4M freakin' records in whatever fookin DB we use?!?! And what does another 200K have to do with bringing that to its knees?!?! What problem are you trying to solve?

Blah, BLAH, BLAH...

Umm... guys... it is the year of our Lord 2010. If adding 200K records to your DB brings it to a WHOPPING 3.6M records and that brings it to its knees, your problem isn't the 200K records. Your problem is that you picked a fershit DB system and put it on fershit computers. And until you understand the problem you are trying to solve I have no interest in helping you solve it. Please leave now, I have work to do.

Oh, BTW, Windows Server someshit systems running some bullshit MS DB crap. God hepp us. You can't learn how to clean that crap fast enough. Somebody flip a light switch, please.

#4 Knucklehead (Link) on 2010-03-12 23:19 (Reply)

I recognize that sentiment, had me laughing. I just spent a couple of weeks using a SCRIPT fer goodness sake deleting 20 million or so transactions from the DB.... because the vendor's 'cleanup' program doesn't. A script (written in a PERL like language)!. And, oh, by the way, I can only delete 50 at a time because otherwise there might be a record lock (who'd a thunk?) and the vendor's app chokes on a record lock. What a P.O.S. application. Of course it is a P.O.S. system and at least I can do all the maintenance while the rest of the system keeps completing sales.

And 200k records? In an SQL DB, fully normalized, that'd be probably 2 million rows in various tables because some first year CS student read a textbook and figured the book doesn't lie, so why NOT do it that way? (Like this DB is designed.)

Ahhh, well. As a contractor it keeps me employed, which is the name of the game.

And Windows? It is the O/S you just love to hate.

#4.1 JoeC on 2010-03-13 11:17 (Reply)

"And Windows? It is the O/S you just love to hate."

The opening paragraph from my Windows Help site:

"Like many people, I've had a real love-hate affair with Windows over the years. Sometimes, it just works as well as any operating system could possibly work. Other times, well, you know the story."

Heh. :)

#4.1.1 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2010-03-13 11:31 (Reply)

Shoot! I forgot. Welcome back Doc. I missed you during your hiatus. What'd yah do? The great circle loop in the winter (to be contrarian)? Your boredom factor must be the size of a gnat. Every time I bookmark one of your sites, I come back and it's gone. So I'll make sure I capture your tips before your latest one disappears, an effort I neglected last time.

P.S. I think I saw your queen of the server room picture somewhere, wrapped in those cables. I think its that glow of youth that makes upcoming nerds want to tackle the challenge of Intel or something, enticed in by pictures such as that. The reality spits 'em out in their 50's, broken and battered by corporate America, to be replaced by yet more panting youth lusting over the latest bit of techno stimulus. Rinse. Repeat.

#4.1.1.1 JoeC on 2010-03-13 12:15 (Reply)

Hey, bud, nice to hear from you.

I got dragged away from the world of blogging by a bunch of pissed-off videophiles because their programs couldn't handle the new hi-res format, aka Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. For the most part, the better video programs are designed to produce DVDs, but that means everything is going to get rendered to the DVD specs of 720 x 480 and 8,000 kbps, which are far below hi-def standards. So, my assigned mission as one of the leaders of this ragtag bunch of degenerates was to figure out what worked and what didn't, and how to 'trick' certain programs into accepting the higher standards.

It wasn't pretty.

But I'd admit some of my workarounds were pretty clever. There's one program that changes the header of a DVD file to SVCD specs, so I hex-edited the program and changed the internal parameters so it ended up changing the DVD header to hi-def specs. That is, while the video is hi-def, the program thinks it's a DVD because of the changed info in the file's header.

As far as my former sites being gone, I've always done that. I get bored with a name or theme, close it down and start again. I also occasionally go through my Maggie's archives and clean out the clutter. I think my neatness fetish is to compensate for what my room looks like. :)

#4.1.1.1.1 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2010-03-13 14:39 (Reply)

Outstanding!

Over the past few months my laptop computer developed problems with "right-clicks" or as you correctly refer to them, "context menus". A right click on various file types would cause a system hang for several minutes (or so it seemed) eventually resulting in dual Dr Watson crash reports.

I downloaded ShellExView, extracted and ran it. It reported a couple of context actions related to programs I had uninstalled some time ago. I disabled the items and ... ta ta ... my right-click problems disappeared!

Thank you, thank you for pointing out this most valuable utility!

#5 DonLee on 2010-03-13 02:27 (Reply)

The right-mouse hang resulted in dual Dr. Watson reports? Yoicks! But it seems to have been because the uninstalled programs didn't remove their entries, so Windows was spending a moment looking for them. Glad this rascal solved the prob!

#6 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2010-03-13 08:53 (Reply)

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Friday, March 12. 2010

Doc's Computin' Tips: Removing context menu entries