Inability to Select Menus...Disappear too Fast

It would seem strange you need to add a registry setting on certain installs. If I open All Programs, then select one of the programs, the menu will stay open until I select something else with the mouse.

Anyway, I would have guessed it was related to the mouse driver or what options might be available in it... If the mouse is moving to another focus or something is requiring attention, you should be able to see it in Task Manager.

Someone the other day had a problem where his hidden taskbar kept jumping up. Maybe these types of problems are related.

I don't think it is a question of adding something to the registry. In some way, the registry has already been "tweaked". The fix I posted dates back to XP and is well publicised. I would guess that it had been altered from the default. In the case of the OP, maybe whoever installed on the DEll, tweaked it up to make it look more responsive for potential buyers.

I found a different solution to this problem which worked for me and I don't have a Dell / or a laptop. It's a Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium machine.

I edited the registry with "regedit" and changed the following key:


HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPererencesMask which is a "REG_BINARY" to the New value of "98 32 03 80 12 00 00 00"

The old value I had which had was "99 32 03 80 12 00 00 00" caused the windows or menu selections on the taskbar to disappear too quickly for me to move the mouse over them to make a selection. All I changed was that 99 to 98 which I looked on an other Windows 7 64-bit machine which did not have this problem.

It works great now!

Some posts tell you to change the key "MenuShowDelay" from 400 to a higher value but that did nothing for me.
Hope this helps someone.

I battlled with this problem for a few months now, tried EVERYTHING that was suggested on any site, and there are MANY people reporting this problem with MANY different fixes working for them. None worked for me but I just found the problem and thought i would share. What I finally tried was going into system config and disabling all service and start up files then rebooting. And the problem disapeared. So then it was a matter of trial and error. Enable all service files, reboot, still good so it must be a file in start up. Enable first ten start up files, reboot, it's back. So it's one of those ten. After losts of reboots I finally found one file in start up that is put there when i log into my companies servers via Citrix. Why that file screw things up i don't know yet but wanted to give others a possible solution if all else fails. As long as i keep it disabled all is fine.