Solved File Explorer Tab Freezes With "Right Click + Shift" Shortcut

For a few years in Win11, I have noticed this quirk and I have finally decided that it annoys me enough that I should ask you folks about it. In File Explorer, you can right click a file or directory and choose "show more options." A shortcut is to hold the Shift key while right clicking. Anytime I use the shortcut, the File Explorer tab freezes. I can no longer click on any files or browse between directories. Any other open tabs in File Explorer remain functional. The only fix I found for the frozen tab is to right click the tab at the top of the page, duplicate it, and resume working with a now functional tab, while closing the old frozen one. Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a fix for it?

My current system is Win11 Pro 23H2, Build 22631.5624. But as mentioned, I have noticed it for a few years in previous builds.

Try Disabling Show More Options

If you use tools like ExplorerPatcher, StartAllBack or any other 3rd party tools like them, try uninstalling them temporarily. See if this persists.

Spunk said:

Try Disabling Show More Options

Disable "Show more options" context menu in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable having to click on "Show more options" to see the full context menu for your account or all users in Windows 11. When you right click on an item in Windows 11, you will see a new modern condensed context menu with Show more options...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll try this and see how it behaves for a few days!

antspants said:

If you use tools like ExplorerPatcher, StartAllBack or any other 3rd party tools like them, try uninstalling them temporarily. See if this persists.

Click to expand...

Thanks. Unfortunately, I'm not using any of those apps. So I'll try the other above option to see if it works.

Spunk said:

Try Disabling Show More Options

Disable "Show more options" context menu in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable having to click on "Show more options" to see the full context menu for your account or all users in Windows 11. When you right click on an item in Windows 11, you will see a new modern condensed context menu with Show more options...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

Quick update:
I tried disabling Show More Options. It seems to be working fine now. The only thing I noticed is that the right-click context window is noticeably latent showing up now, compared to prior versions of Windows. It's not exceptionally bad, but a slight nuisance. But I guess that's a small trade I'm willing to make.

Thanks everyone for your help!

Use Shellxview to disable all non-Microsoft extensions and see if it's then ok.

I used ShellExView a lot of years ago to "repair" a Windows XP whose right-click menu was causing hangs for a buggy/virtual/unnecessary entry introduced by a game's thing (that hadn't any far reason to appear in the right-click menu, so I didn't really lose any menu option; time afterwards I could "transcopy" the fixed version of CmdLineExt.dll -responsible of the said menu entry- from another XP computer and "properly" fix the problem). Of course Windows 11 is very different to XP in many things, but the "buggy contextual option" issue is similar. I could locate my concrete problem and its solution in a web page, but with what I know now I could try allocating time for using ShellExView to play with the contextual entries and try to locate a problematic one, instead of just disabling many.

The idea is to first disable all non-Microsoft shell extensions to determine if the problem is actually caused by a shell extension. Then enable/disable half at a time to quickly narrow it down (or one at a time if you prefer). Sometimes you can start by disabling extensions that others have reported as problematic and find the culprit immediately (if you're lucky). I always start by disabling Adobe stuff.