Windows · Reviewed

Start menu and taskbar right-click menus open slowly

Raised by 114 people over 20 years (2007–2026), in 16 of them.

What people report

2007-09
Context menus take between 3 and 6 seconds on my Windows XPSP2 machine to load the desktop context menu as it thrashes the hard drive.
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2021-04
It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay.
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2024-04
The new menu takes over 2 seconds to open on my laptop. Enough to load a billion rows and perform calculations on them.
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2025-11
Windows 11 right-click takes half a second to respond and Unity3D can take several minutes to boot up
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2026-10
the slowness of right-clicking Windows 11 desktop on my work laptop. It consistently took over ~500ms to open the menu
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Principle

Response time limits (Nielsen's 0.1-second limit)

People report that Start and right-click menus take half a second to several seconds to appear, while menus need to respond within about 0.1 s to feel like direct manipulation.

A fix

Draw the menu frame and built-in items immediately, then add third-party shell extension entries asynchronously with a timeout so a slow handler cannot hold up the menu. Open menus on mouse-down, not release.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 124 source comments