Slow/broken Context Menus, File-Open, Explorer/IE, etc

Several people have recently started experiencing problems in IE, Explorer and Office, as well as with context menus and File Open dialogs (amoung other things) in various applications, including Opus.

These problems are unrelated to the recent Opus 8.2.2.0 update, and unrelated to Opus in general. The actual cause is a conflict between a recent Microsoft security update and other software you may have installed on your system.

Please see this Microsoft bulletin for further information on the problem's cause, symptons and workarounds:

support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=918165

I can confirm that there is no conflict between the security update and Opus itself as I am running the latest Opus and Windows updates on three machines without any problems.

Updated info here: eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1952463,00.asp

The original Microsoft document above that Jon and Nudel have referenced in their posts on this subject indicates that there is an "allow list" for VERCLSID in the registry that you can make use of to get around 'problematic' shell extension handlers. Though the problem does not seem to be a generic Opus+VERCLSID issue, tracking down whatever software you've got running that is causing VERCLSID to choke [i]shouldn't[/i] be too much of a PITA thanks to the ContextMenuDbg debugging functionality Jon & company added in v8.1.0.1.

This was added to help track down shell extension conflicts between XYZ applications and Opus, and is also handy in figuring out how to get JUST the shell menu extensions you want in your Opus menus if you've hidden the normal Windows context menu items in Preferences...

If you have a procedure that you know should cause VERCLSID to choke (i.e. right clicking on something specific) then you should be able to use ContextMenuDbg to dump out a list of the CLSID values of the applications/extensions being invoked/instantiated so that you can add them to the "allow list". Take a peek at the Opus 82 Changes.pdf notes in the Opus install directory for info on using context menu debugging. And good luck trying to figure this out with just Windows Explorer or other file managers... woohoo - thanks Jon!

The ContextMenuDbg feature is also detailed in this FAQ item.