{"id":4994,"date":"2013-05-22T19:02:59","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T23:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=4994"},"modified":"2013-05-22T19:02:59","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T23:02:59","slug":"the-case-of-the-disappearing-right-click-menu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=4994","title":{"rendered":"The case of the disappearing right-click menu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the weirdest thing happened on my main desktop computer: the right-click menu of Windows Explorer, as well as the Windows desktop, disappeared. I was also unable to bring up the Properties dialog, even through the menu bar.<\/p>\n

\"\"The worst part of it is, I could not figure out what happened. A reboot didn’t fix things, nor did an obvious Registry hack (making sure that HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\Explorer\\NoViewContextMenu<\/tt> is set to 0. For some reason, it was set to 1.) Eventually, I resorted to the big guns and used System Restore (thanks to the fact that I do backups daily, I had a restore point from 2AM this morning) to fix things. Still, it bugs me that something happened that I do not understand.<\/p>\n

In comparison with another, mostly identical system, I noted that the other system had no subkeys under the Policies key whatsoever. So I wonder exactly when and how the Explorer and System subkeys were created on this workstation.<\/p>\n

And while I was at it, I searched the Registry a little more and found another, possibly relevant entry: HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\Explorer\\NoViewContextMenu<\/tt>. Once again, this Registry value is missing from the other machine, so I wonder how, why and when it was created on this workstation.<\/p>\n

This is deeply disturbing. I don’t like mysteries, especially not on a machine that I use on a daily basis. Life is short and one does not need to resolve every mystery, but occasionally, such unexpected behavior can be a sign of a security issue.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the weirdest thing happened on my main desktop computer: the right-click menu of Windows Explorer, as well as the Windows desktop, disappeared. I was also unable to bring up the Properties dialog, even through the menu bar. The worst part of it is, I could not figure out what happened. A reboot didn’t fix […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-security","category-personal","category-51-id","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4994"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5000,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions\/5000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}