Question

As the context menu for the desktop and explorer windows is disabled, I wanted to make a little something to bring back some functionality. My idea was to just list out things in a context menu (copy, paste, new, open with, etc) whenever a user right-clicks one of these windows, and then just simulate the appropriate event in the actual menu (file->new, edit->copy, etc). It wouldn’t look perfectly pretty, but it would hopefully allow for the use of right-clicking.

The problem is that I cannot seem to get the actual menu. I opened My Documents and tried going down the child list towards SysListView32, calling GetMenuItemCount each time. Most returned -1, and the only other return value than that was 0.

How am I supposed to get a handle to the (file, edit, view…) menu?
If this isn’t possible, is there a way I could simulate the user clicking something on the normal context menu, even if it’s disabled?

Also, is there a way of making this work for the desktop? You can get the same type of thing if you view it in the explorer window, so I figured there might be a way.

I’m running Windows XP and any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

As per David Heffernan’s comment,

As for your question, you are on the wrong track. 
GetMenuItemCount needs an HMENU but you've been feeding it HWND. 
That won't work. It also won't work from a different process. 
You could possibly write a program that use the shell COM APIs 
to show a context menu for a shell item. But your basic problem 
is the bone-headed group policy. You really need to get that fixed. 
Tell the IT guy that takes the decision that I said he was a fool 
and was stopping you doing any useful work. ;-)

This led me onto the path of using the correct alternative method to achieve my goal.