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

A snapshot before every apply.Not as advice — as a gate.

If the backup cannot be written, the change does not happen. That is the difference between a safety feature and a suggestion, and it is why you can experiment rather than deliberate.

ContextCleaner writes a .reg snapshot before each apply and aborts the apply if it cannot be saved. Snapshots are kept with optional notes and restore in one click, per hive, after a confirmation.

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

"Back up first" is the step everyone skips.

Every guide says to export the registry before changing it. Almost nobody does, because it is a separate manual chore before the thing you actually wanted to do, and it is easy to convince yourself this particular change is too small to matter. The one time it does matter, the backup that would have helped was never made.

Where tooling usually breaks

Optional safety is unreliable safety.

A backup you have to remember protects you only when you are already being careful — which is not when you need it. And a backup written after a partial change captures the damaged state, not the good one. Order and automaticity both matter, and manual workflows reliably get both wrong.

Where ContextCleaner lands

Automatic, ordered, and blocking.

The snapshot happens as part of the apply, before any write, and it is a gate rather than a step: a failed snapshot aborts the apply and nothing is written. Snapshots accumulate rather than rotating away, each with a timestamp, size, and optional note you can search. Restore is one click with a confirmation, and hives are imported independently so a partial refusal does not sink the whole restore.

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 bulk change

You are about to clear every third-party entry in one action, which is a lot of change at once.

One snapshot is written before the batch, so the entire operation reverses with a single restore — or a single undo step, since the batch is recorded as one.

The labelled checkpoint

You want a known-good point before a session of experimentation.

Create a snapshot manually with a note describing it, then search snapshots by note later to find it without reading timestamps.

The partial restore

You restore a snapshot but decline the administrator prompt for machine-wide keys.

Hives import independently, so your per-user changes are restored and the result reports that the machine-wide portion needed approval, rather than failing silently or entirely.

Deep dive

What the snapshot covers, and where its edges are

A snapshot is a `.reg` export of the registry areas ContextCleaner works with, written before an apply runs. Two implementation details are worth knowing because they affect what you can rely on.

The first is encoding. Registry export and import are particular about text encoding: an import will reject a file that is not encoded as it expects. ContextCleaner exports per area, strips the duplicate headers, concatenates the result, and re-emits it as UTF-16 with a byte order mark, which is what the import path accepts. A naively concatenated export is a file that looks correct and fails to restore, which is the worst failure mode a backup can have.

The second is scope, and here it is worth being straight rather than reassuring. The snapshot covers the per-user classes area and the machine-wide shell extensions area. That is where the large majority of what the app changes lives — hidden-entry markers on per-user registrations and the add-on block list. It does not span every location the app is capable of writing to; machine-wide classic verb registrations and New-menu renames outside those two areas are not captured by the snapshot itself. Those changes are covered by the undo history rather than by the snapshot. So the accurate statement is that snapshots cover the keys the app works with, and undo covers every change it makes — which is why both exist and why neither is presented as a replacement for the other.

Restore is deliberately conservative. The file path is canonicalised and checked to confirm it ends in `.reg` and sits inside the application's own snapshot directory, so a crafted file from elsewhere cannot be imported through this path. The contents are then split by hive and each hive imported independently. This matters in practice: a restore touching machine-wide keys needs administrator approval, and if that is declined, independent import means the per-user portion still succeeds. The result distinguishes a full restore from a partial one and from one that required approval, so you know which of the three you got.

Snapshots are not rotated or expired. They are small text files, and each carries its timestamp, size, path, and any note you attached, searchable by note. The design assumption is that you will occasionally want a checkpoint from weeks ago, and that deleting history automatically to save trivial space is a bad trade.

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

Does ContextCleaner really back up before every change?

Before every apply, yes, and it is a gate rather than a step: if the snapshot cannot be written, the apply does not proceed and nothing is changed. It is controlled by a setting that is on by default.

What exactly does a snapshot contain?

A .reg export of the areas the app works with — the per-user classes area and the machine-wide shell extensions area — encoded so the import path will actually accept it. Changes outside those areas, such as machine-wide classic verbs and New-menu renames, are covered by the on-disk undo history rather than by the snapshot.

What happens if a restore is only partly successful?

Hives are imported independently, so a declined administrator prompt for machine-wide keys does not prevent your per-user keys being restored. The result tells you whether the restore was complete, partial, or blocked pending approval.

Are old snapshots deleted automatically?

No. They are small text files and are kept indefinitely, each with a timestamp, size, and an optional note you can search on, so a checkpoint from weeks ago is still there when you want it.

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

Undo that is still there after you reboot. Never open Registry Editor to fix your right-click menu. What changed your shell, and when? Remove the right-click entries you never use.

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