I've been living in a world of pain, ever since my computer at work started to freeze or pause for a long time whenever i right clicked on the desktop or any folder for that matter. My workaround for the time being had been to open a command prompt and do what ever i needed Unix style.
Just today, i finally had some free time to look at this issue (myself) since IT disavowed me ;( last year around November...
The solution i found worked for my case. It consists of removing entries from the context menu via registry edits. the problem was that i had used some tools that resided on the network and somehow were added to the context menu with the network path. I discovered later that some of the network paths were no longer valid since some network folders were retired or moved from our network.
Google turned out some free tools available to scan my registry that allowed me to fix the problem.
i found these tools called Registry Scanner and Shell Menu New from NirSoft that worked very well.
I used the Registry Scanner to look for the Universal Naming Convention UNC symbol '\\' and this turned out all of the entries on my registry that had network paths on it. I noticed that it also picked up other entries, so i had to manually remove each invalid network path entry.
The Shell Menu New tool allowed me to clean up my new context menu to only show the items i most frequently use.
that is all... easy peace!!!
