Windows 7: Menu Show Delay Time

The registry entry MenuShowDelay works very strangely under the MFC Feature Pack. The value is used for menu closure delay:
We saw on some machines where our application is installed (obviously using Feature Pack) that sub menus are not closing. let's say in a drop down I have 2 entries which are sub menus (S1 and S2) and 10 other (lead menus (M1, M2... M10). When I opened the drop down and the cursor was placed on S1 , the corresponding sub menu is displayed. Now I moved the cursor to a leaf menu (M1..M10) and the sub menu is no closed. When I moved to S2, the submenu display is changed accordingly. But again, moving to a leaf leaves the sub menu open
We saw that this behavior occurs when the MenuShowDelay registry key (at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop) value is zero.
I am not sure how the value got the value. In any case, the value should be used for menu showing delay and not for menu hiding delay. So it seems Feature Pack hooked on a registry key used for something else.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance! blapath

Hello Blapath, and welcome to Seven Foirums.

That is a strange issue. How does it behave if you change the MenuShowDelay value to say 3, or back to the default of 400?

In general the registry key value is 400 and menu opening/hiding works normally. The problem occurs when the value is zero. In this case a sub menu opened correctly and immediately, but when i move the cursor to a leaf menu entry, the previously opened (and displayed) sub menu remains to be open. If cursor moves to another sub menu, than the new one is opened. Of course at this point this last sub menu remains open when I move to leaf entry. This opened sub menu remains open, as far as the cursor moves to other leaf entries.
I just tested the case with other values. Here is what I see: when value is small (1 or 10), sub menu appears immediately and closes immediately when cursor moves to a leaf. When value is big (5000), sub menu opens after the defined time and also closes after delay: cursor moved to a sub menu entry; wait 5 sec until sub menu opens; move to another sub menu, then the opened sub menu remains displayed and only after 5 sec the new one is displayed; move to a leaf entry then the opened sub menu remains open 5 sec before it is closed.
I think the delay is sub menu closing is a bug; at least the registry key name indicates only 'opening delay' - but at least it is consistent: the same amount of time waited for opening and for closing. In any case, it seems value zero is handled as a special case, as in this case opening is not delayed, and closing is delayed indefinitely.
I emphases: the problem occurs only for application developed with the MFC Feature Pack. I use Windows 7, the registry key currently is set to 5000 (I didn't reset my host) and menus open and close normally. I opened iTunes, SQL Server Management Studio, Notepad++, FileZilla Client - all of them behaves normally, without any delay in sub menu opening or closing. So it seems Windows 7 in general doesn't even look at the registry key, but Feature Pack does it (even without restarting the host).

Thanks for this tip emibel! This was really irritating me. I don't know whether I am a clutz or its my mouse but I can't keep the cursor on the right menu when it auto-opens sub-menus. So making it open faster was even worse. Its probably the fact that I use the mouse on my bed but your tip helped wonderfully.

Thanks again.

While reading this:

"Tip

The Fade or slide menus into view and Fade out menu items after clicking Visual Effects optiond will also affect how fast menus open and close. Unchecking these options will help speed it up in addition to doing the steps in this tutorial below."

Oops, corrected. Thank you.