ContextCleaner: see every entry in the Windows 11 right-click menu, and which app added it — on the Microsoft Store.

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Guided workflow variation

Your menu is too long.Here is the order to cut it.

Not every entry is worth the same effort. Clearing app add-ons first removes whole clusters at once, which is why the menu shrinks fastest that way — and why going entry-by-entry feels endless.

Work in three passes: clear third-party COM add-ons, prune the New submenu, then handle stragglers individually. ContextCleaner supports all three, with a snapshot before each apply.

Pay once. Own it forever.

One-time purchase on the Microsoft Store · No subscription · Instant install

Get it from Microsoft

Buy through the Microsoft Store—instant install, automatic updates, and a Microsoft receipt for easy expensing. No account needed on our site, and no subscription on Store purchases.

Full ContextCleaner overview
One-time purchase No telemetry Local-first

windows 11 & 10 · no regedit · snapshot before every apply · no network requests

If this sounds like your week

Going entry by entry is why cleanup never finishes.

A long right-click menu looks like a long list of individual problems, so that is how people attack it: find an entry, look up how to remove it, try, repeat. Twenty entries later you are still going, and some of the ones you removed have reappeared. The list was never the right unit of work.

Where tooling usually breaks

The menu has no structure you can see, so you cannot prioritise.

Windows shows you names and icons. It does not show you which app owns an entry, whether two entries share one owner, or which of the four menu surfaces registered it. Without that, there is no way to tell the difference between a five-second fix and a dead end, so effort goes to the wrong places.

Where ContextCleaner lands

Cut by source, not by row.

ContextCleaner groups the menu by where entries actually come from and labels every row with the app behind it. That turns a flat list into an obvious order of operations: the third-party filter plus a single "remove all shown" clears the biggest chunk immediately, the dedicated New-submenu view handles a whole category in one pass, and what remains is short enough to review by hand. Each pass is one apply, one snapshot, and one undo step.

Pay once. Own it forever.

One-time purchase on the Microsoft Store · No subscription · Instant install

Get it from Microsoft

Buy through the Microsoft Store—instant install, automatic updates, and a Microsoft receipt for easy expensing. No account needed on our site, and no subscription on Store purchases.

Learn more about ContextCleaner

windows 11 & 10 · no regedit · snapshot before every apply · no network requests

What you get

Feature highlights

Sees all four menu surfaces

Classic commands, the COM add-ons installed apps register, Windows 11 modern and packaged items, and the New submenu—together in one searchable list.

Shows where every entry came from

Each row names the app, DLL, or package behind it, where it was discovered, and which file types it applies to.

Remove one or clear the whole view

Flip a single toggle, multi-select a batch, or remove every third-party entry in the current view with one button.

A dedicated New menu cleanup

Turn off the document types you never create. The file type keeps working—only the New-menu shortcut goes away, and it is a reversible rename.

Review before anything is written

Changes stage as pending until you press Apply, and machine-wide edits are batched into a single administrator prompt per apply.

Undo that survives restarts

Undo and redo are stored on disk rather than in memory—up to 25 steps each—alongside one-click snapshot restore.

A verifiable record of every change

A hash-chained (SHA-256) local audit log with a one-tap integrity check that reports the exact entry where the chain broke.

Private by default

No network requests at all, no account, no ads, no third-party analytics. Diagnostics exports replace personal folder names first.

Especially when

  • Remove entries from the Windows 11 right-click menu without opening Registry Editor yourself
  • Find out which app added a right-click entry, and why deleting a registry key did not remove it
  • Clean up the right-click New submenu without breaking the underlying file types

Who benefits

Real-world scenarios

The years-old workstation

A machine you have installed hundreds of things on over several years. The right-click menu now runs off the bottom of the screen.

The third-party filter plus one bulk action takes out the bulk of it in a single apply, and the audit log gives you a record of exactly what went.

The New submenu nobody checks

Right-click → New offers a dozen document types, most from software you use for something else entirely.

The dedicated New view lets you turn off the ones you never create. The file types keep working; only the shortcuts go.

The keeper list

You want a shorter menu but there are four or five third-party entries you genuinely rely on every day.

You clear the third-party group, then re-enable the handful you want back — re-enabling is never blocked, and each toggle is its own undo step.

Deep dive

Why one add-on can be five menu entries

The reason a long menu shortens unevenly is that entries and owners are not the same thing. A COM context menu handler is a single registration, but the code behind it decides at display time how many items to draw. An archiver commonly shows a top-level entry plus a submenu of several operations. A cloud drive might add a share action, a link action, and a version-history action. All of that is one handler with one identifier.

This has two practical consequences. First, effort per visible entry removed is wildly different depending on the surface — disabling one handler can be worth five rows, while a classic verb is worth exactly one. Second, it explains a common and confusing failure: you remove several entries individually, they disappear, and then after a reboot or an app update they are all back together. They were never independent. Whatever you did addressed the display rather than the registration, and the registration reasserted itself.

ContextCleaner surfaces the identifier behind each entry, so shared ownership is visible rather than guessed at. When you disable an add-on, every entry it contributes goes at once, and the change is recorded as a block-list entry keyed by that identifier rather than as a deletion of the app's own registration. The app remains fully installed and functional; it simply no longer draws into the shell menu. Re-enabling removes the block-list entry and the entries return.

The New submenu deserves its own pass for a different reason: it is a category rather than a scattering. Every entry in it is the same kind of thing — a document type offered for creation — so a single focused review handles all of them, and the decisions are easy because you either create that file type or you do not. Handling it separately from the main list means you are not making that judgement repeatedly while also thinking about unrelated entries.

What is left after those two passes is usually a short tail: individual classic verbs from specific tools, a couple of modern-menu items from packaged apps. Those are worth doing one at a time, and at that length it is quick. The order matters because it front-loads the passes with the highest ratio of entries removed to decisions made.

Trusted by pragmatic desktop users

Built for people who prefer tools that stay local.

Real workflows: focus timers that stay visible, batches that never leave the disk, and renames you can rewind.

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Our Core Moat

Engineered to respect your system boundaries.

System Resource Monitor (Idle State Comparison)
Automata Labs low idle memory footprint compared to generic Electron applications

Lightweight Native Stack

Compiled Rust core wrapped inside an optimized Tauri shell. No heavy background node loops or duplicate Chromium engines cooking your memory footprint (<25MB idle RAM).

100% Local-First Privacy

Executes entirely on-device with full offline isolation. Absolute zero background telemetry policies, no metrics aggregation, and zero mandatory cloud-sync accounts.

Perpetual Fallback Licenses

Pay a single, clear one-time purchase price. Own your specific native software utility execution tier permanently without artificial subscription paywalls or ongoing usage tax.

FAQ

Straight answers—no glossary dump

What should I remove first to shorten the menu fastest?

Third-party COM add-ons, because one add-on often contributes several visible entries. Filter to third-party, review the list, and clear it in one action. Then prune the New submenu, then handle individual leftovers.

Will a bulk removal break anything important?

Entries File Explorer needs to open folders, drives, and network locations are protected in the backend and cannot be removed, including by a bulk action. You also get a warning before switching off a built-in Windows component, and a snapshot is written before the apply runs.

Can I put back just a few entries after clearing a group?

Yes. Re-enabling is never blocked, even for protected items. Clear the group, then toggle back the specific entries you want. Each change is its own step in the on-disk undo history.

Does a shorter menu make Explorer faster?

ContextCleaner does not measure load time and makes no performance claim. The honest benefit is a menu with less to read and fewer entries to skip past. If you are chasing a specific delay, that is a separate diagnostic question.

What does it need to run?

Windows 11 or Windows 10, and the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which is already present on virtually all Windows 11 PCs. ContextCleaner does not install WebView2 for you. It runs as a standard user; only machine-wide entries need administrator approval, requested once per apply.

Is it private, and how do I get it?

ContextCleaner makes no network requests at all — it requests no networking permission from Windows, so there is no telemetry, no analytics, no ads, and no account. Snapshots and change history stay on your PC. It is a one-time purchase on the Microsoft Store; use the Microsoft Store button on this page for the current listing and price.

Related pages

Remove the right-click entries you never use. Prune the New submenu without breaking file types. Manage the COM add-ons installed apps put in your menu. Every entry came from somewhere. Find out where.

Every right-click entry,
and the app that put it there.

ContextCleaner scans all four surfaces Windows builds the right-click menu from—classic commands, app add-ons, Windows 11 modern and packaged items, and the New submenu—names the app behind each entry, and lets you remove what you never use without opening Registry Editor. A snapshot is written before each apply, and undo survives restarts.

Pay once. Own it forever.

One-time purchase on the Microsoft Store · No subscription · Instant install

Get it from Microsoft

Buy through the Microsoft Store—instant install, automatic updates, and a Microsoft receipt for easy expensing. No account needed on our site, and no subscription on Store purchases.

Open full product page

Technical specifications

Technical specifications for procurement

Spec Implementation
Data Sovereignty Menu edits, snapshots, and the full change history stay on your PC; diagnostics exports replace personal folder names first
Telemetry Status None; no account, no ads, no third-party analytics
Core Runtime Tauri 2 + Rust native Windows app; requires the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which it does not install for you
Network Requirements Makes no network requests at all and requests no networking permission from Windows
Deployment Compatibility Windows 11 and Windows 10; no version gating, so Windows 10 simply shows fewer modern and packaged entries. Microsoft Store
Scope All four menu surfaces: classic commands, COM app add-ons, Windows 11 modern and packaged items, and the New submenu
Provenance Each entry names the app, DLL, or package behind it, where it was discovered, and the file types it applies to
Reversibility Snapshot written before each apply (the apply stops if it cannot be saved), one-click restore, and disk-persisted undo and redo up to 25 steps each
Guardrails Entries File Explorer depends on are protected from removal even by bulk actions; machine-wide edits use one administrator prompt per apply
Accountability Tamper-evident, hash-chained (SHA-256) audit log with one-tap integrity verification, stored only on your PC
Access System tray presence with a customizable hotkey and Ctrl+K quick actions across 14 rebindable shortcuts
Approximate size 30 MB installed or less