Context Menu Cleaner

by Mika Uusnäkki
December 4, 2005

This tool is designed to search through the windows registry in HKCR for keys with the name "contextmenuhandlers" and report the subkeys (optionally filter for subkeys that contain a search term) to the user. The user can then mark for deletion a subset of those keys using the checkboxes in the list. A backup function will export the marked keys using regedit.

The program may be downloaded from http://www.download.com/3000-2094_4-10469502.html The archive contains the following:

ContextMenuCleaner.exe	The core program
ContextMenuCleaner Readme.txt	A text based version of this page

The program is written in C# (C Sharp) and has been verified to run under Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server.

UI Features:

Right Click context menu for the check box list provides options for the following:
- Check All
- Check None
- Inverse Checks
Pressing the Enter key when the search term textbox is in focus will run the search. A blank search term will return all subkeys of all "contextmenuhandlers" keys.
Pressing the Backup button will bring up a save file dialog and proceed to call on regedit to export the checked keys. The program creates a temp file for each key which is deleted as soon as its contents are concatenated to an internal program string. This functionality had to be implemented this way because the inherent C# Registry classes did not fully support all the field types. Specifically, there was no way to recover the environment variables from REG_EXPAND_SZ types since these were automatically expanded. Regedit itself was also unable to handle multiple keys for export from the command line, and no longer supported the "CON" keyword instead of a filename for output to the stdout stream for quick concat using ">> fname.reg".
Pressing the Delete! button will pop up a confirmation message box to which the user must select Yes to continue deleting the checked keys. The default is No.
The Progress indicator displays a heirarchical progress count, displaying which key number of the total subkeys of a given level is being processed. For example: "_230/4321_1920/8533" This means that of the subkeys for key 230, subkey number 1920 is being processed. This is limited to displaying only when the number of subkeys exceeds 100.

Additional Notes:

Warning! This tool is not for beginners. Take care when making registry modifications.

Bugs To: thehankerchief@yahoo.com