Corrupted System Apps in Win11?

My Win11 PC had been running fine until yesterday. I’ve been working on graphics… **no** new programs and not much surfing. The first symptom was items in the taskbar, particularly Copilot, not launching. I uninstalled Copilot just to be safe and the taskbar works fine now. *But* symptoms I still have are: context menus (right click) frequently hang, giving me an hourglass icon but never opening. Resetting Explorer will stop the hanging, but the context menu will still not open. Folder, Zip, and Drive context menus never work. PNG, JPG, MP4, MKV context menus work once, then don’t work the second time and hang. PDF, PSD, SVG and some other types work normally. Some systems apps, eg Photos, Snipping Tool, Paint, hang. A second account on the same machine has the same issue.

- Ran DSIM / SFC and didn’t find problems.

- Updated windows

- Clean install of graphics drivers using DDU

- Suspected Acrobat or VLC… uninstalled these and few other programs without improvement.

- Disabled non-Microsoft context menu items with ShellExView and ShellMenuView without improvement.

- Safemode: **Context menus work normal as does second login!** However we will learn below the problem is probably not with third party software.

- Since safemode worked, I used msconfig:boot:diagnostic startup. I got one error for Samsung Magician, so I uninstalled it. Context menus worked with just the basic drivers, but the problem returned during the next normal startup and Magician doesn’t seem to be a factor.

- Updated Bios of MSI motherboard… no improvement though it beeps now when booting. I think it’s just defaulted to a post beep and is not necessarily a memory warning.

- Reseated RAM sticks due to the above. No change. All are recognized.

- Event Viewer had some errors configuring the runtime for several app packages, eg. Photos was one of them, Web Experience Pack another. I tried to restore them individually but no luck. After several attempts to re-register all system apps, it finally got through and **context menus came back briefly** as well as the Photo app working. **But only until the next restart! Then the problem returned.**

I think I’ve gotten as far as I can after almost 12 hours of trial and error. What is corrupting my Windows apps, and in turn bugging out context menus? How can I fix the apps permanently?

Windows 11 Pro, Version 24H2, build 26100.6584