Right-click menu (context menu) contains blank lines or is completely empty

I too had this problem resolved by a Restart. Here were my specific problems:

1) Using File Explorer I did Right-Click on a file/folder. The resulting context menu was blank except for for unseen entries that had another dropdown box where the distinguishing right carat at end of supposed entry DID show. 

2) When I brought  up START and tried to get a context menu up for any of the START entries, the context menu area was not only as described in 1 above, but also only about 3 characters in width. In 1 above, the context menu was the correct size -- just blank entries. In 2 the context entry had correct vertical size indicating the the correct number of entries (unseen) was determined -- just the horizontal size was wrong.

3) I went to System Tray and did Left-Click on Sound and got NOTHING. What should have happened is a popup allowing me to adjust speaker sound.

After messing with just these problems for an hour, I did a Restart and all was cleared up.

What was I doing when this problem occurred? I was copying Windows.old from my PC to a portable Hard Disk. It apparently also had problems: After about an hour of coping and at 99% with just 5 minutes left, the copy (COPY from PC, Paste to Portable HD) hung there for over 25 minutes before I displayed DETAILS and it showed files still being handled. I eventually canceled this after trying to resolve the context menu issues. It did NOT resolve them. I also did a File Explorer RESTART which did NOT resolve the issues. Only a PC Restart worked.

I tried to use the Answer Desk but got someone after 25 minutes who could barely understand English who gave me a number to call -- Microsoft Corporate -- to report a problem! Well, you probably know that didn't work.

If anybody has a clue to these problems, please holler back. If somebody knows how to expediently REPORT a BUG, I'd sure would like to know how to. thanks.

Sorry, but no NVIDIA. fyi I am on a Dell Inspiron 1400, 5 GB. When this occurred I was simply doing light browsing except for for one intensive copy function going on as stated. I should have taken the time to look at machine resources being used, but was too immersed in finishing the W10 upgrade from W7 install. The upgrade was complete and I was doing the last thing to complete MY plan, mainly copy windows.old folder to a Toshiba portable HD. The copy went all the way to 99%, but never finished, spinning there for at least another 20-25 minutes after it said it had nothing left to do, but was still reporting files being copied. I suspect it was accumulating memory and possibly we had a memory overlap. However, I had no noticeable performance problems.

What were you doing when or just before you saw the problem -- btw, what I saw matched your screen snapshots except the as time went along, the partial entries in context messages went to no entries at all except for the dropdown indicators in the menu.

Hopefully we won't see the problem again. Do you see anything common between our systems or functions operating at the time? If it ever happens again, I'll also take snapshots AND monitor resources and processes/services running. Otherwise, thing are running fine and the upgrade was a breeze.

I too have this issue.  Opened a thread before I saw this one, so I'm just linking for future reference when this is fixed:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-files/context-menus-in-file-explorer-not-rendering/279cc5f2-4ea8-404b-bb39-521f6571550d

I am using a Dell Latitude E6420 and also did some extensive copy operations from my NAS to my local HDD some time before the error occurred. I did not check CPU/RAM consumption at that time. 

 btw, what I saw matched your screen snapshots except the as time went along, the partial entries in context messages went to no entries at all except for the dropdown indicators in the menu.

I can confirm this scenario, too. It seemed to be random whether a few lines were filled with text or not.

The error showed up immediately after having finished a fresh install of win 10 with all required drivers.

zachd,

I'll redo the windows.old copy Monday/Tuesday to see if it causes the problem again (and/or other problem too). I will also capture resources being used during the copy and particularly near end when it "hangs" at 99%. Hopefully I experience the right-click problem and can claim it is reproducible. Stay tuned. Thanks for getting involved.

This happened to me too, also while I was moving the WINDOWS.OLD folder to another partition. Due to a few files that TrustedInstaller wouldn't let me move or delete (which also seemed to break the 'time remaining' estimate), I stopped and restarted the move a few times.

The context menus were always broken exactly during the move operation. Every time, they were immediately OK again after the move was stopped (no reboot or even re-login). And every time, they were broken again when I restarted the move. Since then, I've never had that problem again.

zachd,

Problem IS reproducible.I have it and several problems captured with Screen Snapshots and text explaining each. How do I get it to you? It is in a Microsoft .DOC file.

The short, the DISPLAYING of the  Context Menus gets corrupted ONLY during the long COPY job (Windows.Old to Toshiba Portable HD). The entries are really there, but blank and sometimes appear partially. For example, if you Right-Click a file and go ahead and click the blank area where PROPERTIES SHOULD appear, yo indeed bring up Properties. After I canceled the COPY (ran for 2 hours and never beyond 60% complete), the menus displayed correctly (also a Restart of PC clears things).

Here is the end of my document:

This document should have enough to confirm AND REPRODUCE several ERRORS:

a) Right-click Context Menus corrupted or just displayed wrong out of Explorer, START, TaskBar, System Tray Expansion. This problem only existed by the COPY job was running. The menus were fine after canceling the COPY task.

b) Performance problem with at last COPY

c) I would also look into Windows Defender being in the way. Should have an option on COPY to BYPASS Windows Defender when copying huge files

d) Explore toolbar gets corrupted also

e) Defender ICON does not always appear in System Tray. Also, what happened to the nice option to change what appears in System Tray (always, notification, etc.) as in W7?

f) AFTER I canceled the COPY, ALL Context menus came back correctly, but my Desktop was cluttered with ICONS that turned out be prompts for programs to use for files????? That is, if you open a file that has no file association, you get a propt to select one. However, these did NOT come up on screen until I ended the COPY job by canceling the task.

g) Lost all the Quick Access folders in Explorer that I Pinned earlier.

10 54: Restart time to see what gets cleared!

h) Displaying Properties of a large file takes a long, long time to populate SIZE. This never happened on W7.

i) COPY job showed 42,957 items to copy at start. When I started deleted E:\windows.old it counted 89,319 items for the 23.4 GB that got there! Another COPY error! The DELETE of E:\windows.old (permanently, not recycle folder) started at 11:15 and finally ended at xxxxx. Why? Just delete the index! At least the Context Menus didn’t corrupt while it was deleting this long!

Give me a place to upload my document with screen captures validating the above. Thanks.

Thanks for spending your time on reproducing the error and describing it in detail! 

Just my two cents: Although the error occurred during copying a larger amount of files (it was not the windows.old folder), the problem with the menu was still there after the copy job was finished. After a restart, the menu was back.

I also had the impression that the large copy job was interrupted after some time and did neither finish to copy all files nor notify the user about an error. This happened together with the context menu problem. After a restart, the same copy job worked fine and actually moved all files.