Right click on File Explorer icon on taskbar is not working on certain networked computers for certain account

Question

I have a roaming account for my company's networked computers. OS on them are Window10. On two of them that I frequently use, the right-click on File Explorer icon on taskbar is not functional recently, i.e., nothing popup, the system seems just ignoring my right click. (Or should I say, it took more than >15 minutes or perhaps hours to respond with the expected popup if I just let the computer go after my right click and come back to it later, I accidentally found.) Right click on other icons (except for File Explorer icon) on the taskbar works fine.

The strange thing is that other user accounts have no such issue when logging-in to these two computers. Even more strange, my account has no such issue when logging-in to other computers except these two. My local IT could not explain this behavior. They tried many ways to fix the issue. They even completely re-built the system on one of the two computers. Still the same issue persists after my log-in.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Can some experts here give a rational explanation of the above strange phenomenon and suggest ways for resolving the issue? Perhaps there is a setup issue with my roaming account?

Answer 1

After some trial as directed by the above 2 answers and a lots of readings on the internet, I realize that it indicates corrupted roaming profile (roaming profile is evil, like they say). The local IT could not spend more time on it. I am not a IT guy so I hacked another user name and bump it up for admin privilege after lots of trial and errors. I use that to remove my local profile and now everything seems fine (although I lost my old settings but I did backed up my data file). It seems the local IT rebuilt my computer but then put back my corrupted profile, which is my only explanation at the moment. They did not really tell me their procedures (not that I can understand even if they did). Seems they just follow the procedure most of the time without understanding.

Answer 2

Hello YuMingCollings,

From my experience, this is most of the times connected to mapped drives to this user. Could you check if you have any Login Script or batch file that connects (or try to connect a drive, but will not show in File Explorer because it fails) at the login? Maybe some third party tool that creates those drives, even OneDrive?

I will recommend to check the Event Viewer for System and Application during the logon time and doubleclicking in File Explorer, in order to spot some Warning or Errors related to network paths, authentication issues, etc...

Also run a gpresult /h outputfile.html to see applying GPOs

Hope this helps narrowing it down,
Best regards,

Answer 3

Hi @Yu, Ming Collins

Download, unzip and execute Autoruns as admin:
https://learn.microsoft.com/it-it/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns
Options
select Hide Microsoft entries
open Explorer tab
uncheck all items and close the program
Try a right click again