A bug has been discovered in Windows 11 environments where right-clicking an image file on the desktop causes the context menu to become transparent and not render correctly.
I accidentally discovered this phenomenon while prototyping a tool to extend the right-click menu. It's characterized by worsening symptoms with repeated certain operations and occurs regardless of Windows 11 theme settings. This article explains the detailed conditions under which it occurs and the suspected cause: dynamic menu loading.
Transparency symptoms that only occur on the desktop.
This bug only occurs when right-clicking on the desktop screen to display the menu, and not within folders or other locations in File Explorer.
If you repeatedly open and close the menu, the menu background will gradually become transparent. Furthermore, each time you right-click on an image file, the duration of this transparency increases. After repeating this several times, the menu items will appear unnaturally raised from the background.
The cause is the dynamic loading of the image menu.
This phenomenon doesn't occur with all files; it only happens when right-clicking on image files. For files with other extensions, the menu never becomes transparent, no matter how many times you right-click.
The cause is likely related to the processing of context menu items specific to image files. When you right-click on an image file, special items such as "Photos" and "Edit with Paint" are added.
These menu items are designed to load asynchronously with a slight delay, rather than immediately after right-clicking. If processing cannot keep up, multiple "Loading..." messages will appear on the menu.
It is suspected that this dynamic loading process is putting a load on the Windows 11 rendering system (such as acrylic effects), causing a bug in transparency processing.
Occurrence in both dark mode and light mode
During the testing of the right-click extension tool, we changed the theme and performed tests, but this bug is not dependent on the OS color mode.
We have confirmed that the right-click menu transparency issue occurs regardless of whether you are using dark mode or light mode. This indicates a bug in the context menu generation process itself, rather than an issue with the theme's rendering settings.
OS versions where the bug has been confirmed
Currently, this right-click menu bug is known to occur on the following OS versions:
- Windows 11 25H2 (OS Build 26200.8039)
- Windows 11 25H2 (OS Build 26200.8106)
These are the latest environments, including those in preview, but since this is a system-side bug, we are waiting for a fix from Microsoft in a future update.
