After about the billionth time being frustrated by this, I found a fix on the web and thought I'd spread it around a bit...

The concept of the "Send To" context menu in Windows is quite a good one, and I use it all the time. I specifically like the idea of having things like a shortcut to a catch-all program like UltraEdit in there, so no matter which type of file I've got up on the screen, I can squirt it over to UltraEdit for some hackery.

Another thing I use it for is sending files to a taxi folder, the purpose being that the next time my laptop is on my home network, I can look in the taxi folder and see what files I'd meant to copy onto my home PC.

But there's been a long-standing problem, which is, the Send To folder, by default, includes all drive letters, including CD-roms, external disks, memory cards, and mapped drives. This is all well and good if you always want to send the file to the root directory of the disk in question, which I never want to do.

It's a problem because some of the above drives, mapped drives especially, may or may not be readily available. And Windows scans the drives in question to see if they're available before showing you the rest of the Send To menu.

You can see where this is going. I want to send a file to my taxi folder because I'm not on the home network but there's a file I want to remember to taxi over when I get back to the home network. So I click on the Send To menu. And then I WAIT 30 SECONDS BECAUSE I'M NOT ON THE HOME NETWORK AND IT'S TRYING TO TALK TO A MAPPED DRIVE THAT'S NOT THERE. Argh.

Cleaning out shortcuts from the user's "Send To" folder doesn't solve the problem because the drive letters aren't shortcuts, they appear in the Send To menu by default.

Solution: Secret registry value exists to disable root drive letters on the Send To menu, thus making your Send To menu snappy and instant no matter what the status of your attached drives is.

- Clean up your User's "Send To" folder in the user's home directory if you haven't already done so.

- Regedit the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

- Add a new DWORD (32-bit) Value.

- Value name is NoDrivesInSendToMenu

- Value data is 1

- Logoff and logon to apply the changes


Yay! Snappy send to menu.