Q. Problem is when I click on the “This PC” folder and open it on my desktop, and see all my hard drives, I cannot right-click on any of them to get properties or whatever else I want to do.  It acts like it is trying to do something, but after about 5 seconds, my entire screen goes blank, the folder closes, and all my icons get thrown to the top left corner of my monitor. 

Other weird right-click issues… I cannot right-click on any custom folders I have set up on my desktop.  Nothing happens except the screen goes blank and messes up my icons as above. 

The only thing I can right-click on is the “This PC” icon, and the recycle bin icon.  And when the right-click menu pops up on the recycle bin, the empty the recycle bin option is greyed out.  I have to double click the recycle bin, and then select whatever is in there, and delete it manually.

I upgraded from W7.. never had this problem before.  All updates applied on W10.

Answer.

It was caused by a third party context menu extension. 

Found this solution on the Windows 8 forums dating back to 2013

This is the solution:

Please download: ShellExView – Shell Extension Manager For Windows

This is the solution:

1. This program does not require installation, just right click and run as Administrator
2. From the menu, click on Options then click on Filter by Extension Type and select Context Menu
3. On the list, you’ll see some of the entries with a pink background, those are installed by the third-party software
4. Hold down the CTRL key and select all of them then click on the red button on the top left corner to disable.
5. Click on the Options again and select Restart Explorer
6. Now try to right-click on the desktop to see if it fixes your problem. If it does then start to enable one by one and repeat step 5 until the problem occurs again, that’s the offending extension.

For me it was an autocad type extension that was the culprit. 

Did run into one issue as I was solving the problem whereas I disabled everything to begin the troubleshooting process, and I lost my desktop and it would not come back up to allow me to test anything.  Had to do Ctrl-Alt-Del, and within task manager click on a file, run a new task, and type in explorer.exe to get it to run again.