When right-clicking on some files and folders, PowerDesk may crash. Uninstalling PowerDesk, or disabling its context menu entries corrects this issue. This issue will occur when certain versions of Norton 360 are also installed on the computer. This problem occurs in both PowerDesk 6 & 7.

An update is available that will correct this issue.


To install the update:

  1. Click on the "ContextMenu.exe" shown below.
  2. Select the Save option and download the update to your Desktop.
  3. Once downloaded, double-click on the file to launch the extraction wizard. On Windows Vista, depending on your setup, you may need to run the patch with Administrator privileges. To do so, please right-click on the patch file and select "Run As Administrator" from the context menu.
  4. When the installation wizard appears, click through the wizard and select the location of your PowerDesk installation directory. For most customers, this will be the default location which appears.
  5. When you click Finish to the wizard, the update will make a copy of the old PowerDesk context menu .dll and copy over the new fixed version. You may see a quick DOS command-prompt window appear and disappear. This is normal.
  6. When you have completed running the update, you must reboot your machine for the change to take affect.


How to verify the corrected files are in place:


In your PowerDesk installation directory, you should find several new files:

  • ContextMenu.bat
  • PDShExt.new
  • PDShExt.orig


After that patch is run, the time stamp of the file "PDShExt.dll" should match that on the file "PDShExt.new". You should also find that the time stamp on the file "PDShExt.orig" should be earlier than those files.

Note: This patch was specifically created for PowerDesk 7. We have found that this patch will normally resolve the same issue in PowerDesk 6. However, installing this patch on PowerDesk 6 may cause other features in PowerDesk 6 to no longer function.


ContextMenu.exe