Windows 7: How do you clean up the Open With right-click context menu?

Did you try Nir's openwithview



It gives the option to disable them .

It also gives you the reg entries - so you can find them from that if you want to manually remove.

Hey man, cheers but it hasn't prevented the programs from showing up at all! I dunno whether its because I got the UAC on or not, usually run programs as Administrator with no problems so I'm expecting Windows 7 has some backup or it could be the MRU_List in the registry I dunno

This can also be a file association or plugin issue. As for opening avi files in Chrome etc., look at this page for ideas.

Stop playing media files within browser - Google Chrome Help

Another thing, many apps give you the option to tweak shell integration. E.g. in winrar, I can decide exactly what context menu options are available via the program window itself. Explore such options for the apps you use.

See these pages for ways to finger the context menu.

Edit Context Menu Items In Windows 7 & Vista

How to Clean Up Your Messy Windows Context Menu - How-To Geek

Just a thought.
Are you running 64-bit? Some of these registry keys get duplicated in the Wow6432Node. Sometimes you have to change the entries in the Wow6432Node as well, sometimes they change themselves when you modify the "regular" registry keys.

Cheers for those links I'll give them a try, InfraView was annoying to get rid of through the registry as it constantly kept showing up in the list but, now its gone and I had a FLV Player problem where Open with>Flv Player.exe would play a .flv file with VLC instead but got that sorted

Oh I'm running 32 bit on my laptop but, I think the registry is doing that anyway somehow as I've deleted entries and, when I restart the laptop every entry is the same as it was before I changed them!

Which keys are you deleting and which ones remain?

Some keys are copies of others, you may just be deleting the copies. Next time you log in / reboot the copies are recreated from the "masters".

Can you post full details of one example. In regedit, Export all the "Shell / Open" keys for a specific program. Edit the exported files using Notepad and and copy and post the key data here?

Tip:
Whenever I Export keys from the Registry, I always rename the exported file to a .txt file straight away (keeping the .reg part of the name). That way if I double-click it it opens in Notepad rather than is applied to the Registry. Seems much safer to me.

Not a bad idea Darkstar. You can always change open context menu item to open .reg files with notepad instead of regedit.

Use the merge option to merge, obviously.

Well I kind of missed out the Class roots part so now everything seems to be sorted out, Windows Movie Maker and Live Photo Viewer can't seem to be found and their still on all options of Open With when it comes to video files :s