7-Zip Context Menu Not Working?
February 10, 2012
I’ve been using 7-Zip for years now and stumbled across a strange issue on my laptop. I’ve been unable to manage to get the context menu to show up despite checking the settings and reconfiguring them various times. It seems, when I downloaded 7-Zip I paid no attention to 64-bit vs. 32-bit, and here in lies the problem. I am running Windows 7 64-bit but had installed the 32-bit version of 7-Zip. Uninstalling the 32-bit version and installing the 64-bit version has solved the issue in what turned out to be a much easier fix than I had anticipated.
The remaining issue, would be to determine what causes the difference in behavior. Maybe something to do when I ever find the time…
One Comment
leave one →
I’ll save you the time… the reason is that a 32-bit shell extension (the 7-zip context menu) can’t be hosted in a 64-bit process (Windows Explorer).
Raymond Chen (of ‘The Old New Thing’) explains the underlying technical reasons for this better than I ever could, if you’re curious:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/10/20/9006720.aspx