How To Remove Useless Items From Right-Click Context Menu By Hacking Registry

There have been instances with me, and I’m sure with everyone else too, when you install applications like an anti-virus, WinZip or other such apps that end up adding some items into the context menu when you right-click on a folder or a file. Excluding Windows Vista, these applications and programs install something known as a shell extension to add apps in the context menu. If you delete these extensions from the Registry, then you will not get these additional items in your menu.

A right-click context menu is shown in the image below. You can see there are several additional items in the menu like Scan with ESET NOD32, SmartFTP and so on and so forth. In this tutorial, I will show you how to remove these unnecessary items by removing SmartFTP from the menu.

Just a reminder, we recommend that you make a backup of your registry in case you remove a folder by mistake. The back will help you to restore the deleted file.

Remove Item from Context Menu of Files

Go to the start menu and type in the following in the search bar: regedit. Hit Enter to send the command. This will open up your Registry (shown below). You are looking for the following folder: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContexMenuHandlers.

To remove this, you want to start by making a backup of SmartFTP by right-clicking selecting the Export option. The registry needs to be saved in a safe place to make sure you do this. Deleting the folder is a lot easier once you complete the backup.

This will remove the SmartFTP item from the context menu of every file in your computer.

Remove Item from Context Menu of Folders

Again, open the registry. Navigate to the following: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\contextmenuhandlers

Delete the SmartFTP folder the same way you did before when you deleted it from files. Again, you will see the SmartFTP option removed from every context menu in each file and folder in your computer.

We hope that this tutorial will help you Remove Useless Items From Right-Click Context Menu By Hacking Registry.

Image Courtesy: Addictivetips

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  1. Ben

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