[Windows 10 Tip] Restore Classic Windows 7 Style Context Menus in Explorer and Desktop
A small program brings back the familiar Windows classic style to your taskbar context menu. (Windows Classic style menu has an appearance which depends on your theme, it looks the context menu popup when you right click a title bar). The tweaker works by injecting a dynamic library into the explorer process which then intercepts some messages and hooks a few Windows APIs. This program doesn't have any executable EXE file.
The successor of legacy Taskbar-Context-Menu-Tweaker
(the legacy branch), the new version employs a new code injection mechanism
(MinHook) which dramatically reduces
chance of crashing.
- Windows 10 10240, 10586, 14393, 10593, 16299, 17134 (both x86 and x64, up to 1803)
- Windows Server 2016
- MAY work on technical preview versions
- MAY work on Windows PE systems (No guarantee)
Developed with VC++ 2017
NO runtime dependencies! Works without VC2017 runtime!
- Choose the correct version, e.g. 64 bit dll only work with 64 bit Windows 10
- Copy the dll into
C:\Windows\System32
(Not SysWOW64, ALWAYS System32) - Inject the dll by using the following command:
rundll32 TaskbarContextMenuTweaker.dll,Inject
- That's all, the context menu has been reverted back to the classic style
Customizing appearance of the context menu can be done with some registry modifications.
- Open
regedit.exe
with administrative privilege - Navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
- Create a DWORD value
ContextMenuConfig
if it does not exist. - Its value would be set to any of the following:
- 0 - to show classic context menu in Taskbar (Default)
- 1 - to show dark modern (immersive) context menu in Taskbar
- 2 - to show icons in menu
- Create a String value
ToggleMenuTitle
if you want to add your name or other text string in Taskbar context menu
- After restarting explorer.exe, the context menu changes back to Windows 10 modern style. You have to manually execute the injection command. (Maybe I should make a light-weight background process which automatically performs this!)
- Add the command to registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
to achieve automatic injection during starting up. - There's also a command for detaching the dll from explorer.exe:
rundll32 TaskbarContextMenuTweaker.dll,Release
- "Inject" and "Release" are case sensitive!