@jhgarrison said:
I’ve never been able to figure out where they live.
For Notepad++, they are in the NppShell.dll. Hence my pointing to the NppShell issue. The two links I provided explain that, because the Publisher field in the AppManifest changed, Windows hashes them different, and Windows doesn’t remove the “old” if the hashes don’t match (so one app doesn’t delete another app’s context menu entries).
Explanation: Windows wanted signed DLLs to control such things, rather than any apps that can figure out how to write to the HKCU in the registry being able to manipulate what apps the user accesses through the normal right click context menu. Thus, those hooks now reside in the DLL, not in the registry, so you cannot find those hooks by searching the registry.