The Problem
If you have been looking for a way to add cascading menus to the Windows 7 Explorer using static registry entries you may have found this article on MSDN. It is either too obscure to understand or wrong, or both, at least in the version dated 5/3/2011.
The description below was derived from looking at what registry accesses Explorer performs when you open a context menu (using MS / Sysinternals Process Explorer).
The Solution
First you create an “anchor” entry that will be added to the context menu:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\myusefultools_anchor] "MUIVerb"="My Useful Tools" "ExtendedSubCommandsKey"="*\\ContextMenus\\myusefultools"
If ExtendedSubCommandsKey is set to “foo\bar” then Explorer will look for the key “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\foo\bar\Shell”. Under that key it expects one subkey for each entry, e.g. (using the above value for ExtendedSubCommandsKey):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ContextMenus\myusefultools\Shell\001cmdhere] "MUIVerb"="Open CMD here" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ContextMenus\myusefultools\Shell\001cmdhere\command] @="cmd.exe" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ContextMenus\myusefultools\Shell\010morecmd] "MUIVerb"="Another Command" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ContextMenus\myusefultools\Shell\010morecmd\command] @="cmd.exe"
Random stuff
Add "Position"="Bottom" to the anchor entry if you want it to show up at the bottom of the context menu.
The submenu entries are sorted according to the name of their registry key. I added 0XX to the names to force a specific order. As described in the MSDN article the CommandFlags value can be added (using the codes listed here) to customize the menu entries and create separators.
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ContextMenus\myusefultools\Shell\005separator] "CommandFlags"=dword:00000008
