Just before Christmas I got a new laptop from work to replace my old Lenovo T420s which had reached it’s end of life. To replace it I got a Dell Latitude E7440 with I7 CPU, 16 GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. A lot more power packed in to a case of roughly the same size.
Now first thing I did after receiving the laptop was to install Windows 8.1 so that I could get started. But after doing initial installs and joining our domain something was wrong. Normally you can right click the Windows “Start Button” in Windows 8.1 and get shortcuts to Control Panel, Device Manager and the likes. But this was not working! Nothing happened when I right clicked the logo. And with Windows 8.1 and being joined to a domain, searching for administrative tools does not work. You can’t search for Control Panel to find it. So I had come to rely on this context menu.
So after a lot of searching and talking to my colleagues I finally found the issue. The context menu is controlled by a folder in:
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows
In this folder should be a folder called WinX. This folder contains the shortcuts that are used for the context menu. If this folder is missing the context menu won’t work. Now the recommendation I found was to copy this folder from a machine where it was working. But there is a much easier solution. The same folder is located in the “default” profile in this location:
C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows
So just copying this solved my problem 🙂