You restored the classic menu and it still takes two seconds to appear — or worse, Explorer hangs when you right click. The tweak was never going to fix that: it chooses the menu, but the menu's speed is set by the program entries that load into it. This page is the hunt for the one entry that is thinking too long.
Think of the classic menu as a bus: restoring it put every stop back on the route, including the slow ones. Each entry is a small piece of code from some program, and Explorer waits for them while the menu is drawn. A slow menu almost always means one extension is doing something expensive — checking a network path, waking a cloud sync, or scanning before it shows its face. The method below finds it without guessing.
Slow on files but instant on the desktop points at file handlers. Slow everywhere points at one global handler. Slow only inside one folder points at that folder's contents — network locations and synced folders are repeat offenders. Two minutes of noticing which pattern you have saves an hour of disabling things at random, and it is the difference between a diagnosis and a superstition.
The compact Windows 11 menu loads a short list. The classic menu loads every legacy handler at once. On a clean PC that is still instant; on a PC carrying years of program entries, the full list simply does more work per click. That is the trade you accepted when you restored it — and it is why cleaning the list, not blaming the tweak, is the fix.
The free ShellExView utility from NirSoft lists the shell extensions installed on the PC and separates most third party entries from Microsoft's own. Download it only from NirSoft's official site. Treat its list as your suspect sheet: names, companies, and above all the entries you do not recognise are the interesting rows. This page points you at the tool; the hunt itself is the next card.
Disable one suspect in ShellExView, restart Windows Explorer, and test a right click. Work through non Microsoft entries first, starting with anything you no longer use or recognise. The moment the delay vanishes, the last entry you disabled was the culprit — re-enable the rest. Uninstalling the parent program afterwards removes its extension permanently, which is the tidy ending once you are sure.
If the menu is fast in a fresh user account on the same PC, the problem is your own profile's accumulated entries. If the whole PC is slow everywhere, suspect the disk and memory before the menu. And a freezing Explorer on every right click right after an update can be one damaged handler — for which the one by one disable above is still the test that proves it.
First make sure the menu itself is the one you want — the video shows the one click switch to classic, live.
▶ Watch Full VideoThe compact menu loads a short list of entries. The classic menu loads every legacy program entry at once, so one slow extension delays the whole menu. Cleaning up that entry fixes the speed while keeping the classic layout.
It is a long standing free utility from NirSoft for viewing and disabling shell extensions, used widely by technicians. Download it only from the official NirSoft site - fix tools are frequent malware bait on mirror sites.
Start with the one by one disable test in ShellExView, beginning with third party entries you do not recognise. A freeze on right click is the classic signature of one broken handler, and disabling it restores Explorer immediately.