Greetings. I am new to NIS and to this forum. My previous attempt to post vanished in a poppup so I will not be as thorough this time for lack of patience.
I have been following threads on this subject and, being a victim thereof myself, have found a pattern:
- I installed NIS-2009 from the CD
- On completion, it runs a 30-MB live update. At this point, my context menus all still work.
- Some time overnight, NIS runs a live update and horswaggles me into allowing it to restart my system so that the update may take effect. (As an aside, I think it is ridiculous that NIS can be installed from scratch without requiring a reboot while an update requires one. But nobody's perfect.
)
Upon restart, the context menus have begun to misbehave, crashing Windows Explorer when I righ-click a file or folder. In context of this forum, I have seem somments about other software:
- PowerDesk. I happen to have release 5 installed on my machine but realized I have not used it in years and could probably afford to uninstall it. (It's the free version with the nag screens.)
- Context Menu Editor (http://www.bartdart.com/)
- Shell Extension Viewer (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/shellexview.html)
I downloaded & installed the latter two and found an interesting anomaly I know was intruduced only after that overnight live update. (The curent install is a second install.) Here is a screen shoot of the Context Menu Editor for folders:
That highlighted item does not appear in the Shell Extension Viewer. However, ShEV does allow me to disable specific menu items. While the Symantec item remains stubbornly enables (How *would* I disable it if I wanted to?) , I was able to disable another item called [PowerDesk Zip Menu]. This last step was an epiphany, inspired by remarks that PowerDesk does not play nice with newer Windows conventions as assumed by NIS. Thus, apparently, NIS exacerbates the problem.
After I disabled that item, I opened another explorer window and right-clicked files and directories, including ZIP files.
It was not necessary to uninstall PowerDesk in order to remove the obstacle. In fact, the PowerDesk item is still in the context menu and will successfully open PowerDesk on the selected directory. Of course, it's not of much use, since PowerDesk itself will still crash if right-click anything.
Since I have been using Qdir as an alternative to Windows Explorer, I had to test that out as well. It works just fine.
Note: When I started writing this, I did not have the solution. By carefully articulating the question, the solution came to me. This is an exercise of a principle I learned post high school, oft-quoted (in my circles) from Rabbi Chaim (Soloveichik) of Brisk:
If you understand the question clearly, you already have half of the answer.
I recommend y'all download those two utilities, though Context Menu Editor has quirks - you can't see the entire key and you can't undo a removal. In this case, I would have removed the wrong item anyway.
-- Rasputin (Concise is my middle name 
) Paskudniak