Archivers are the clearest illustration of the difference between a registration and a menu entry, and understanding it explains every frustration people have with removing them.
A COM context menu handler is a single registration identified by one identifier. When you right-click, the shell loads it and asks what it wants to contribute. The handler answers dynamically — it can add one item, a submenu, or a dozen top-level commands, and it can vary that based on what you selected. 7-Zip and WinRAR both use this to build a rich integration: a branded submenu containing several operations, plus commonly used commands promoted to the top level so they are reachable without opening the submenu. All of that is one registration.
This produces three consequences that match exactly what people report. First, individual removal does not work, because the entries are not individually registered — there is nothing per-entry to remove. Second, the entries always come back together, because whatever restored the handler restored all of its output at once. Third, per-extension registry edits miss, because archivers typically register against file-type association groupings that apply across many extensions rather than against one class, so deleting a key for `.zip` leaves the handler applying to everything else.
The right unit of action is therefore the handler. ContextCleaner resolves it to a readable identity — backing library, publisher where recorded, friendly name, and identifier — and disables it by adding the identifier to the shell extensions block list. That list is a mechanism Windows provides and honours specifically for this purpose. Nothing about the application's own registration is altered, which is why the app stays completely functional and why the change survives application updates: an updater repairing its own registrations does not remove an unrelated block-list value.
Because the block list the shell honours is machine-wide, disabling an archiver handler requires administrator approval. ContextCleaner batches all machine-wide operations from one apply into a single prompt, so disabling both archivers plus other add-ons in the same pass asks once.
Worth noting on scope: some archiver entries are classic verbs rather than handler output — an "Open with" style entry, for instance. Those are separate rows in the list and are hidden individually. The handler accounts for the bulk of the cluster, but if a stray entry remains after disabling it, that is why, and it is handled the same way as any other classic entry.
