Remove Winamp Context Menu Items from Vista

I get very tired of every application adding items to my Windows Explorer right-click menu and making it difficult to remove them. Winamp has an easy preferences panel to let you configure which items show up, but sadly it doesn’t seem to work in Windows Vista.

The problem is caused because the Winamp installer runs in administrator mode, which has access to add global menu items, but running Winamp as a regular user prevents you from modifying the items that are added by the installer.

Find Winamp in the start menu, and then right-click the entry and choose Run as administrator. This is the most important step!

Open the Winamp preferences from the system tray icon or otherwise, and then browse down to General Preferences \ Jump To File \ Shell Options.

Here’s where it gets interesting… if nothing is selected in this dialog, you should select all of the items and then de-select the ones you don’t want. This will “reset” the context menu items.

Now when you right-click on a folder you won’t see the items anymore. Just remember, the only way to add or remove the items is by launching the application in Administrator mode. (At least until they fix this problem).