I have identified the problem, or more accurately stmussini found it in his post. The "lock fences" option disappears if you set "Show Labels" to "Never" in the Fences configuration app under the "Color & appearance" tab. Setting it to "On Mouseover" restores the option.
Yes, I did reboot twice. I even rebooted a third time after the reinstall activation munged my desktop hoping that would restore the config. As previously stated, the Lock Fences option did reappear but I needed to restore from the latest snapshot to get my configuration back and that action apparently also removed the Lock Fences option. Just to be clear, the "Config Fences" option always appears and was never missing. The Fences opacity settings also appear, so the right-click menu
The PURGE initially appeared to work (with errors - see the output below) and restore the "Lock Fences" action to the right-click menu but it DID destroy my previous fences layout. I was able to restore the previous Fences layout from my daily snapshot but this action once again removed the "Lock Fences" option, so I'm back to square one. Output from PURGE: SUCCESS: The process "explorer.exe" with PID 9560 has been terminated.
Before I PURGE, I want to be sure that my current fences configuration won't be deleted. It took me a long time to configure everything "just so" and I really don't want to have to recreate it from scratch.
I'm a bit unhappy with this response; it suggests that you didn't even read my original post. The "Lock Fences" feature does not show up in my desktop right-click view->... menu. I am linking two screenshots . The first shows the view menu when I right-click on the desktop background, the second shows the view menu when I right-click on a "fenced" area. Note that the "Lock Fences" option is not there . It was working fine before
I just upgraded from Fences 2 to Fences 4 and the "Lock Fences" option no longer appears in the view->... menu. Has this (very important) feature been removed? I've looked in all the sub-menus and in the Fences configuration app but I don't see anything.
I just want to add that I had exactly the same problem. Re-checking the box (and rebooting) fixed the problem, although all of the previous items on my recently-used list were gone. [update] After a Win10 patch last night the option was once again disabled. Same fix, but something is clearly not working here.