Right Click Not Working on Windows 11? Fix It

If right-clicking on the desktop does nothing — no context menu, no spinning cursor, just nothing — restart Windows Explorer first. Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager, find Windows Explorer in the Processes list, right-click it (ironic, I know) and hit Restart. Takes two seconds, the desktop blinks, and right-click usually comes back. Explorer handles the desktop context menu, and when it gets wedged — which happens more than it should — the menu just stops appearing.

I had this three times in one week after the 24H2 November update. My own machine. Right-click would work for a day or two after a restart, then silently die again. Turned out a shell extension from WinRAR was crashing every time Explorer tried to build the context menu. The extension would fault, Explorer would suppress the error, and the menu would just not show up. No error message, no event log entry, nothing. Just a dead right-click.

Shell Extensions Are Usually the Problem

Windows 11’s context menu is two layers. The new simplified menu shows up first — Copy, Rename, Delete, that stuff. “Show more options” at the bottom opens the old Windows 10 menu where third-party apps add their entries. When a shell extension in that second layer crashes during menu construction, the entire right-click fails.

Download ShellExView from NirSoft — it’s a free utility that lists every shell extension registered on your system and lets you disable them individually. Sort by Company Name. Disable everything that isn’t Microsoft. Right-click your desktop. If the menu works now, one of those extensions is the culprit. Re-enable them in batches of five until you find which one breaks it.

The usual suspects: old versions of WinRAR, 7-Zip before 24.09, Dropbox’s overlay handler, NVIDIA’s “Open with” entries, and — this one’s annoying — Kaspersky’s context menu scanner. Any of these can silently crash the menu without logging anything.

If you don’t want to install ShellExView, you can check the registry directly at HKCR\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers. Each subkey is a context menu handler. But ShellExView is faster and shows you which DLL each handler loads, which makes it much easier to figure out what belongs to what.

The Windows 11 Context Menu Specifically

If the old-style context menu works (Shift+F10 brings it up) but the new Windows 11 context menu doesn’t appear at all — the modern menu component is corrupted. This is separate from shell extensions because the new menu is a XAML-based overlay that doesn’t load third-party extensions at all.

Try reregistering the shell:

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Windows.ShellExperienceHost | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Run that in PowerShell as admin. If the ShellExperienceHost package is corrupted, this replaces it. Same command people use to fix the Start menu because it’s the same underlying component. If your taskbar is also frozen, the shell corruption is broader and reregistering fixes both.

If right-click only fails in File Explorer but works on the desktop, the issue is specifically with the explorer window’s context menu handler, not the shell itself. Try resetting File Explorer — open a Folder Options window (Control Panel, File Explorer Options), click “Restore defaults” on the General tab, then “Reset Folders” on the View tab. This clears any stuck folder view settings that can interfere with the context menu.

Tablet Mode and Touchscreen Ghosts

On laptops with touchscreens, check if tablet mode somehow got enabled. In tablet mode, right-click behaves differently — it becomes a long-press gesture and the traditional context menu might not appear from a mouse click at all. Settings, System, Tablet — make sure “When I sign in” is set to desktop mode, and the toggle for tablet mode is off.

Touchscreen weirdness also kills drag and drop — Windows thinks you’re doing a long-press gesture instead of a drag, so files won’t move. Same root cause, different symptom.

I’ve also seen phantom touch inputs from a failing touchscreen digitizer suppress right-clicks entirely. The screen registers ghost touches faster than you can click, and Windows processes the phantom input instead of your mouse click. If you suspect this, disable the touchscreen temporarily — Device Manager, Human Interface Devices, HID-compliant touch screen, right-click, Disable device. If right-click immediately starts working, the touchscreen hardware is the problem.