This was it! Bloody spot on !!!
I recently updated from 7 to 10 and the installation was fine with no problems. One of the extras I was pleased to have at hand was the right-click on the Start button menu options. I had no reason to go into them at depth but thought I would have a look later down the track.
When I decided to have a look the right-click didn't work. I've been racking my brain to work out why not and when going over my notes it stuck in the back of my head that possibly deleting the arrows on Shortcut icons might have had something to do with it, yet I could not see how ridding the desktop of unecessary adornments could have an effect on the operability of a button.
But sure enough, on reversing my deletion of killing the arrows the operation of right-click returned. Justlast Knight's offhand remark is the only one I have seen that mentions this fix and I give him a huge pat on the back.
I tried the cutting and pasting that others mentioned but I found the easiest and most accurate way to restore the Registry entries was to do it manually.
Run - Regedit
Go to
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile and
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\piffile
and to each add a new Dword name by
Edit - New - Dword name
Name it IsShortcut and accept the default values.
By the way it has taken me two nights on Microsoft's support pages and a phone call to (I think the Philipines which was a waste of an hour) just to set up a Microsoft account so I could reply to the post. Bloody Microsoft!
JK's post was spot on so please spread the word about this fix and give him credit, a pat on the back or a cigar.