I was doing some major tinkering with my laptop last week and accidentally blew apart my user profile. So I just created a new one and ran into a very annoying hitch. Each time I would right click for a context menu, the option that I select would then be persistent and stuck on my screen. After trying to recreate this issue, I also noticed that context menu’s would be transparent until I hovered directly over them (much like it would try to fade in, but only 1/2 way).

I seemed to be only able to remove these ghost items by either logging off or task killing DWM. Since DWM will restart immediately after killing it, that was my solution until I could dig a bit further. Later in the week, I whipped open Visual Studio to work on some apps and noticed that VS 2008 wasn’t playing nice. Since I was on a new user, I figured a quick repair should handle that… And then wouldn’t ya know it, the context menu’s were fixed! Just to make sure that was the original cause, I created another account and was able to get the exact same results.

If anyone comes across this same issue in VS 2005 or Vista, please let me know!