Drewcorp Coding and Technology

How To Remove “Encrypted Archive” Context Menu For UPEK Biometrics From “My Computer”

Posted on 12 January 2010

I wrote recently about some correspondence I had with UPEK support to remove the “Encrypted Archive” menu items from the context menu of the whole file system. I thought it was a bit of a nuisance and wanted it removed, so UPEK immediately provided me with a registry key to delete that would solve my problem.

A couple days ago I noticed that although the registry fix effectively removed it from the menu when I right-clicked files, that fix apparently did not include the root drive context menu. If I were to right-click any of my drives in “Computer” (or “My Computer”), the menu returned.

So I eventually got around to contacting UPEK again, and once more they responded immediately. I must say I’m not used to this level of support. And I also appreciate not being coddled. I always hate dealing with support when they assume you know nothing about computers. I always have to assure them I’ve gone through all these troubleshooting steps. In this case I suppose there’s no troubleshooting to be done, but still the fact that they gave me a very straightforward registry edit made me very happy.

So here it is:

Delete the "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\SafearchiveContextMenu" registry key.