Darren Myher's Blog

For some reason the “New Text Document” option went missing from my right-click context sensitive menu in Windows Explorer.  Here’s how I went about fixing it.

First of all, what you need to know about the right-click menus is that they are mostly maintained in the registry under the HKCR key.

In the case of .txt files, you’re looking for HKCR\.txt:

When the context menu option to create new text documents was missing, on my machine there weren’t any sub-keys under this .txt key.

To find the correct values I simply connected to another computer where the key was working and then copied the values from there, but to save you time, here are the values that worked for me:

There should be a Key “ShellNew” under the .txt key containing these values:

Expandable String Value: “ItemName” with value: @%SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe,-470

String Value: “NullFile” without any configuration setting

There should be a Key: “PersistentHandler” also under .txt

with default value set to: {5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}

Once those items are in place, the right-click, new, Text Document option should re-appear on the explorer context sensitive menu.