born live love die

Okay, it is hard to hate an inanimate object, but one of the things that is easy to do in MS windows is to allow software vendors to labor the user with stuff and make it harder to use the computer. MS enables this.

I had to get PGP Desktop installed on my machine. I got the trial version. After the trial period expired, I found an open source variant that works fine. But the context menu on my system has been set up by PGP to offer options to encrypt and decrypt files. This is an attempt by PGP to gain user mindshare, but it just pisses me off. I get a modal dialog box when I click on a file that complains about the PGP installation that isn’t there.

How to get rid of it? That is where the fun begins. After 30 minutes, this is what I found via Google:

Removing Entries that appear in all Context Menus

This set of steps will show you how you can remove entries in the context menu that appear in all menus for all file types that were put there by programs such as Picozip.

1. Start up the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start button and selecting Run. Then type regedit in the box and click OK.
2. When the Registry Editor appears, expand the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT folder. You will now see a list of every file type that is set up on your computer.
3. If the entry that you want to remove from the context menu appears in all context menus such as the Picozip example above, you will have to expand the * folder.
4. Now that you have the correct folder expanded, expand the Shellex and ContextMenuHandlers folders. Your registry path should look like HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers.
5. Look through the list until you find the entry that you want to remove. Right-click on the folder of the entry and select delete. You will find that identifying some of the programs is easy. For example, Picozip is labeled Picozip. However, you may run into some items that are listed using their application ID number or a vague name. If that is the case, copy (Control + C) the application ID, which is formatted like this—{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}—to the clipboard. You may have to expand the folder to see the ID. Then, once you have the ID copied to the clipboard, press Control + F to bring up the Search box in regedit and paste the ID in the box. Next, just click Find and you should be able to find some other references to that same ID in your registry that also might give you some clues to what it is. If that does not work, try doing a search on Google to see if that turns up anything.
6. Once you are finished removing all of the entries from your context menus, just close Registry Editor and you are finished. Your changes will be in effect immediately.

Windows sucks.