Participant

Answered

Disable adobe right-click context menu using Active Directory

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
May 18, 2016
5 replies
55357 views

Hello,

We would like to disable the adobe right mouse click context menu for our employees that don't have rights to use the Adobe Acrobat pro XI software. With Active Directory we can control the users in GROUPS who can see and use the Adobe acrobat pro XI software, but as standard all users see the adobe acrobat pro right click context menu which is used to convert/combine to PDF.

We can disable the whole adobe context menu by editing or removing the root registry key (see under) but then the users with rights for adobe pro XI can't use it anymore. Normally enabling/disabling registry keys isn't a problem when it's a current user key, but the context menu is found in the ROOT class.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{A6595CD1-BF77-430A-A452-18696685F7C7}\InprocServer32]

@="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Acrobat 11.0\\Acrobat Elements\\ContextMenuShim64.dll"

"ThreadingModel"="Apartment"

Can somebody help us how we can manage the right click context menu using Active Directory user Groups?

If there are any questions, just let me know!

Norman Etty

Application Manager

Correct answer TerminalFIN

Sorry to resurrect an old threat, but I solved this today with the help of Adobe support.

Modify the registry key located at Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Adobe.Acrobat.ContextMenu. Change the value for (Default) by adding two dashes to the front of the string, --{A6595CD1-BF77-430A-A452-18696685F7C7}.

This solved it for me and the context menu entries are gone!

T

TerminalFINCorrect answer

Participant

Sorry to resurrect an old threat, but I solved this today with the help of Adobe support.

Modify the registry key located at Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Adobe.Acrobat.ContextMenu. Change the value for (Default) by adding two dashes to the front of the string, --{A6595CD1-BF77-430A-A452-18696685F7C7}.

This solved it for me and the context menu entries are gone!

T

talented_Eclipse5DAA

Participant

Now its August 2020. I've tried running the following in the elevated command prompt:

cd /d C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat Elements

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenuShim64.dll

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenu64.dll

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenu.dll

And also deleted the 3 files.

The damn context menu WILL be back but not because of updating the Adobe Acrobat DC, but simply by opening any 2 PDF files, AND dragging any of them outside of the Adobe Acrobat DC, just to have 2 windows side-by-side. The menu will be back. The deleted files will be back too! Anyone can try this.

I also tried deleting the context menu from CCleaner, similarly it is not permanent.

Damn you Adobe! I wish I can mark this thread as unanswered!

S

Siri5FD3

Participant

Same here... I want to disable only Ctrl Right Click

N

naderi

Participant

Or just run the Command Promt (or PowerShell) as Administrator and enter these commands:

cd /d C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat Elements

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenuShim64.dll

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenu64.dll

regsvr32.exe /u ContextMenu.dll

that will remove Adobe Acrobat DC context menu without deleting the files.

Andreas Jansson

Inspiring

Thank you Naderi! After uregistering those dll:s, using your code, context menus appear ligthning fast when right clicking on files, just as when my computer was new. There has been a short delay when I right click any file, for quite a while. Now I realize it was due to the Acrobat explorer integration, after installing Acrobat. Adobe needs to address this, so that the Acrobat Windows integration is not done by default, when installing Acrobat, since it slows down right click menus like this. Especially since there is no built-in option to remove the Windows integration.

(The delay is distict even on a fast computer with SSD.)

Removing the entries in the registrey using regsvr32 /u is a much better option than deleting the files, that was suggested above.

I also want to stress that you really need to run the command prompt as Administrator. Naderi wrote that, but I tried running with my own user first anyway, and got messages stating success, so I thought it might have worked, but the menu items were still there after restarting the computer. After running the same lines of code from a command window opened as Administrator it worked fine (right-click on cmd, select "run as administrator", and paste Naderi's code into the command prompt window, or paste it into a .bat file and run it as administrator by right clicking).

S

Steve Cordero

Adobe Employee

This is trying to think "outside the box" and would not be supported, but rather than delete files for the program, why not use the built in Windows functionality to just unregister the dlls per USER/GROUP with a Startup/Shutdown script controlled by GPO. This way you maintain the integrity of the application for those users who do have permissions and those who do not have permissions.

_

_-_3

Inspiring

That's probably a good GPO environment solution, would be nice to have it included in the Acrobat settings as well, for individual users. This is quite common in software that offers to use shell extensions..