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Whenever I click the right button on my USB mouse or trackpad of my laptop, Windows Explorer will crash and restart. All windows opened will close.

I am using Windows 7 Enterprise. Has anyone else faced such a situation before?

This happened just after I plugged in a USB 3.0 hard drive to my laptop.

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2 Answers

Sounds like a buggy context menu hook. If it started right after a USB drive was inserted then it's likely that either the drive came preloaded with "value add" crapware (I'm looking at you, SanDisk) or that the USB drive was infected with a piece of autorun malware that hooks the context menu in Explorer.

Look through the registered shell extensions with ShellExView and look through the shell menu handlers with ShellMenuView for suspicious entries. Don't go disabling things willy-nilly, but going through the (admittedly long) list of items may yield some answers. Anything from Microsoft is safe and may be very important, you're looking for entries which don't name a Publisher or that was modified near the time the problem started is immediately suspect.

If it is malware then you can run some diagnostics and post the logs at various analysis and removal forums like Bleeping Computer, Malwarebytes or 247fixes for a volunteer to look at and advise removal steps.

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Have you installed any extra software came with the usb drive? When you click right button the context menu loads, so any plugin which part of the context menu fails can fail the explorer. Does it also crashes if you right click on desktop directly? Or on a file in Explorer?

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