Right-clicking in the blank area of a Folder Portal crashes Fences 6

from Stardock Forums

Installed Fences 6 recently and set up my desktop.
When I right-click in the blank area of a Folder Portal Fences 6 crashes.
Very repeatable. Need a solution.

Please let me know what logs I can provide to help figure this out.


Thanks.

Moved to Fences area

stardock software fences 6 win 11 right-click folder portal crash fences
3,721 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

We need more information on your system.

Full Windows version, please use winver.exe ( example 25H2 - 26200.7171)

Full Fences version number. (example 6.0.5.2)

 I am not able to reproduce this on my system.

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

 When you say blank area, do you mean a folder portal that is pointing at a folder that has no content in it or do you mean the blank area in-between the columns?

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

@bdsams
Any blank area inside of a Folder Portal that is 'not' an icon. Clicking on the same area in a normal fence works ok and brings up the context menu just fine. But if I do the same thing inside a Folder Portal fence, Fences crashes and restarts. It doesn't matter if there are items showing in the Folder Portal fence or not. Right-clicking on the blank area inside the fence restarts Fences.
Example attached. Anywhere inside the red lines will crash my Fences 6.Right-click in Folder Portal crashes Fences 6

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

Do you have any other apps adding content to the context menu? I cant seem to repro here but the issue would seem to be tied to that event - so my rough guess is that something is trying to load and failing.

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

@bdams that was it. Thanks.
Should anyone else report this have them do the following for a quick test:

  1. Hold down shift and right-click on a blank area of their desktop. (Don't bother involving Fences at this point)

  2. If explorer crashes, have them refer to the info below as it fixed it for me.

Troubleshooting I went through:

 

  1. Searched on context menu troubleshooting. Thanks Google for the GREAT AI Overview that led to me being able to resolve the issue. Because it was in that info that I read about the 'legacy' context menu in Windows. Turned out that if I tried to open the full Legacy Context Menu (Win 11 now hides some stuff by default so you have to hold shift and THEN right-click to see it) then Explorer crashed! I didn't even know that was going on. 

  2. So I read info about registry entries

  3. Looked at the registry entries using RegEdit but you can't really know for sure what is going on there

  4. Searched on tools to deal with Context Menu issues on Google. Thanks again to Google. :)

  5. Downloaded the free Nirsoft Windows tool ShellExView from the LINK near the bottom of the page: (https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html) for https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview_setup.exe 

  6. Installed and ran ShellExView

  7. From the Options menu, choose 'Hide all Microsoft Extensions'

  8. That left me with 26 items to potentially work on.

  9. I first disabled all of them by selecting them all and then disabling them using the red button up top.

  10. I then retested and Fences didn't have an issue. Yay. :)

  11. I began re-enabling extensions starting with all of my must-haves and working back in time as best I could.

  12. I ended up thinking it would be one of 4 remaining entries that was the issue.

  13. But lo and behold, after re-enabling the remaining ones, the crash was gone! :)

    Soooo....the process of disabling and re-enabling all of the non-Microsoft extensions somehow fixed some hidden issue.

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

Good to know! If you find out the offending shell extension, please let us know? Always helpful to look into it on their behalf, or add detection so that we can warn. Thanks again

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

Problem is back. Guess I hadn't rebooted the PC and then tried. Given how my process I went through 'fixed' it without actually disabling an extension, I probably should have remembered to do that before commenting. So I'll go back through this process above again and whittle down the real offending shell extension and let you all know. More than likely I bet it's one of the 4 or so I suspected but we'll see.

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top

Ok, nailed down after some testing and rebooting the problematic shell extension and thankfully it's something I don't need to keep enabled. The one and only problem extension I left disabled was the old Adobe Drive CS4 one.

Here is the info from that wonderful free Nirsoft tool ShellExView.
Extension Name: Adobe Drive CS4
Type: Context Menu
Description: Adobe Drive Menu
Version: 4.0.0.0client1
Filename: ADFSMenu.dll
File Extensions: Directory\Background, AllFileSystemObjects, Drive