Monday, November 29, 2010

Cannot Right Click Desktop or in Windows Explorer

If you are having troubles with the context menu (right click menu), right clicking on the desktop does not do anything then most probably you have your group policies set to not displaying the context menu in windows explorer. You can change it in two ways. One from the group policy editor and one from the registry editor.

1)From Group Policy Editor
To re-enable your context menu from the group policy editor, go to Run –> gpedit.msc –> User Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Windows Components –> Windows Explorer. In the right hand pane, find “Windows Explorer’s default context menu”, open its properties by double clicking it. If it’s enabled or not configured, disable it and your context menu will be back as soon as you apply this policy.

2 - From Registry Editor

To re-enable your context menu from the registry, go to Run –> regedit –> HKEY_CURRENT_USER –> Software –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CurrentVersion –> Policies –> Explorer. In the right hand pane find “NoViewContextMenu”, set its value to 0 if it exists. If you still can’t right click your desktop, then you can look for the same key here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> Software –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CurrentVersion –> Policies –> Explorer

2 comments:
Write comments
  1. What if you don't Window Explorer's default context menu option in the group policy editor, nor the NoViewContextMenu option in the registry?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have the same question. I only have two choices. One is the default and the other is no drive type auto run...please help. .

    ReplyDelete