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windowswindows-8menushell-extensionswindows-10

Why does Windows Shell context menu handler break power-user menu (Win+x) on Windows 8/10?

My custom Windows shell context menu handler works like a charm, for all Windows versions from XP to 7, but on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, installing it breaks the Win+X menu (sometimes called "Power user menu", or "Quick Access menu", or "WinX menu"): when hitting Win+X, the menu is displayed as expected, but its items do not work anymore (nothing happens when I click on them), except for the last four items at the bottom which still work as expected ("Search", "Run", "Shut down/Sign out", "Desktop"):

power-user menu

I quickly found out on Google that it was a well known issue for a great number of shell extensions that were not "compatible" with Windows 8/10. But sadly, I only found application users talking about this issue and its "solutions", and no developer talking about this. And the two "solutions" proposed by these users were:

  1. Unregistering this shell extension
  2. Uninstalling the app that registered this shell extension (which leads to solution 1...)

See for example this, this, or this to read people talking about this issue.

Note: my shell extension is applied for the * file type, which means all files.

Several days later, I found the cause of this issue in the shell extension source code, so I thought it would help other developers to share it on StackOverflow, as a self-answered question (I didn't find this question). See answer above.

Solution

  • I first looked at the shell extension sample code provided by Microsoft (which doesn't cause this issue), compared it with my code, and progressively replaced parts of my code with Microsoft's code and testing it after each replacement.

    I found out that what prevents power-user menu to work is what you return in method InvokeCommand() from IContextMenu interface: if your extension cannot handle the given verb, it shall always return E_FAIL so that Windows tries with other implementations of IContextMenu (see Microsoft documentation for more details). It seems that when a power-user menu item was clicked, Windows first called my extension (* file type), then since it didn't return E_FAIL for this unknown verb, Windows thought that my shell extension has processed this event, so it didn't process it through the nominal power-user menu callback.

    By the way, three things seem very weird to me:

    1. Why does Windows even try to process this power-user menu event with a shell file extension? Is this menu coded using the same design/mechanism as any other Explorer's file contextual menu?

    2. Why does this bug didn't produce more side-effects yet? I mean this should have broken the whole shell extension system right from the beginning, no?

    3. Why do so many applications has this bug? (meaning why so many applications do not return E_FAIL as expected?). It's been a while now that I've written this code, I can't really remember where it comes from, but I guess it comes from a Microsoft sample or any Microsoft employee tutorial (far too Microsoft-oriented to be coded by yourself). If it's the case, that may answer the question why so many shell extensions cause this issue...

    I would be interested if someone has some ideas to share about this subject! By the way, I hope my post can help other developers. When looking at the new Microsoft example that works like a charm, I was first afraid having to rewrite all my shell extension from their sample without knowing what was wrong in my code!