I have a lovely computer. It’s really the first time in my life I’ve had a machine that was more robust than my needs dictated; it’s a nice Dell i7 core box running Win7 Pro and it runs like greased lightning. But over the past year or so, I’ve been plagued by one glaring problem that I couldn’t diagnose properly… until tonight.

It was my context menus. Right-click on anything, and that dratted menu would take about 30 seconds to pop up. When you’re working away at a project, you need speed and responsiveness, and this was getting worse and worse. Googling suggested the problem was in a defective context-menu handler, probably a third-party one, and recommended a number of long, involved, and messy investigations. I installed ShellExView and disabled shell extensions one by one, or in clusters using a binary search pattern, but nothing helped. Nothing. Ploret des yeulx, ma barbe blanche tiret, I was about to slit my wrists in frustration – but I finally found the culprit, something that didn’t show up in shell extensions or elsewhere: MPCBContextMenu. It’s a context menu handler that was installed on my system along with JustCloud, my current backup program.

JustCloud works well, I have unlimited storage, it backs up my stuff quietly and unobtrusively, and it was fairly cheap for a two-year plan. But this particular .dll file is a steaming mass of camel ejecta, and just pulling it out of my Program Files directory and re-booting solved the problem.

There are hardly words to express my relief. By the silken breast of Mogg’s mother – if you are having the same difficulty, go search for this file. It’s probably in your program files (x86) directory under JustCloud. Kill it. Exterminate it. BURN it with FIRE!

The Old Wolf rejoices.