After a clean install of Windows 7 Home Basic with all updates applied and all other software working as expected on a friends laptop no context menus show up.
Please advise me what to do.
Hi @andrievorster,
Can you tell me what other software is installed on the system?
There is a local communication aspect to the software where the shell extension (context menus and overlays) talks to the odrive app. If that communication is prevented then the menus and overlays won’t show up. Generally things like endpoint protection, antivirus, malware protection, and other such products that could be monitoring low-level process interaction and communication are the likely suspects.
Does the odrive client seem to be working normally, otherwise?
Hi @Tony,
Google Chrome, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, VLC, Office 2016 Word and Excel, D-Link Connection Manager, 7-Zip, MyDefrag and UltraCopier.
I use Bitdefender Free as my antivirus, but it is also installed on my laptop and I have no issues.
EDIT 3: I also have MyDefrag, UltraCopier and 7-Zip on my own PC and everything works correctly on my PC.
Yes, the client works normally otherwise.
Thanks for your reply!
EDIT:
I disabled Bitdefender Free and rebooted and tried, still no success.
The enteries are enabled, but they are highlighted red in NirSoft’s ShellExView.
SECOND EDIT:
I have tried Deauthorizing and Reauthorizing, reinstalling after complete uninstallation and cleanup (for the 3 time today) and I have checked that the installer runs correctly (with admin rights) all the way through the installation.
Hi @andrievorster,
Thanks for the additional info.
This is normal. There is a setting in ShellExView under Options to “Mark Non-Microsoft Extensions”, which will highlight them in that reddish color.
One thing you could try is creating a new user on that system and running odrive for that user to see if the problem persists.
Do you have other systems with Windows 7 Home Basic on them with the same configurations that work with odrive?
Can you send a diagnostic from the system from the odrive menu?
Hi @Tony,
My pleasure.
Yes my personal laptop has the same configuration.
I sent the diagnostics. I will pm you from what account it is.
Thanks!
Hi @Tony,
I found a (maybe the) solution! For some unexplained reason Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1 was turned off in Windows Features. Turning it back on fixed the problem.
Can you maybe implement a check for this service as a patch on the program?
I can’t believe a thing as small as this took my so much time, it should not be necessary.
Thanks,
Andrie
Interesting. Nice sleuthing @andrievorster!
.net 3.5.1 shouldn’t be required, so we’ll have to investigate this. Thanks for the follow-up and for spending the time to troubleshoot!
Necroing an old help thread because I’ve got the same problem: the explorer shell extensions are missing (Win7 Ultimate x64, Odrive 7398).
Tried repair installs with and without anti-virus running, confirmed that dotNet v3.5.1 has a checkmark in installed Windows components.
Green checkmark overlays are showing on linked cloud storage account folders, but without the explorer shell extensions, I cannot choose to sync files or folders and only see the placeholders.
Hi @hmdb ,
To confirm, you are running Windows 7? We haven’t actually tested on Windows 7 for quite a while. The context menu loading hasn’t changed, though, so it should still be working.
There is a utility that can be used to quickly see which shell extensions are loaded. You can download it here: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview-x64.zip
Extract, run the shexview.exe and then use the “Find” feature to search for “odrive context”. What does it show?
Thanks for the quick response. Yes, I still use Win 7; I have an opinion on everything M$ turned out after that, and it’s not good. 
Here’s what shexview shows related to odrive sync.
I should mention that it’s not an issue with other explorer shell extensions. 7-Zip, WinRAR, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox all work and behave like expected. What I want to do with with odrive is put cloud storage under one roof, instead of having separate sync clients (of which, that’s true and another reason, OneDrive got discontinued for Win7).
Oh, and happy Halloween.
Hi @hmdb ,
It looks like the extension is loaded. Maybe there is something blocking the communication between the context menu extension and the odrive app?
There is a logfile we can enable. Go to C:\Users\[user name here]\.odrive and open the extensionConfig.txt file that you see there. There is an extra option we can add to the file to enable context menu logging.
Here is how the file content should look when enabling the logging:
{
"timeout": 0.2,
"log_enabled": true
}
Once enabled, go to the odrive folder and right right-click on items in there. You should see a logfile created on your desktop folder named “ContextMenu.log” that may give us more info.
Uhm, sorry, there’s no log file that gets created anywhere (the desktop, the .odrive folder in the user profile, the log folder in the .odrive folder, or the odrive sync folder) with the logging flag set in the config file. 
Even after restarting odrive sync.
I can right-click all I want on placeholder files, placeholder folders, or folders that have sync’d and got the green check mark, because I’ve opened them to get the folder content as placeholders.
I found an older installer (1.0.7272) and tried that but it’s the same as with 1.0.7398, no explorer shell extension for odrive.
What’s the oldest odrive sync for Windows desktop client that’s still supported that I can download the installer from somewhere?
Hi @hmdb ,
Interesting. The extension appears loaded, as per shexview, but it does not seem to be loaded, in reality.
We actually haven’t changed how extensions are loaded. The method is the same as it was when Windows 7 was the norm, so I don’t think going to an older version will help here, unfortunately.
There is an alternate method that may work for you in Windows 7, where a custom context menu option will be provided. You could give this a shot:
Lots of error messages in the cmd shell:
& {$o=“$HOME.odrive\common”;(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile <<<< (“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveCliGui.ps1”, “$o\odriveCliGui.ps1”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveSync.lnk”, “$HOME\sendto\odriveSync.lnk”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/odrivecli-win”, “$o\oc.zip”);$shl=new-object -com shell.application; $shl.namespace(“$o”).copyhere($shl.namespace(“$o\oc.zip”).items(),0x10);del “$o\oc.zip”;}
CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (
, MethodInvocationException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : DotNetMethodException
& {$o=“$HOME.odrive\common”;(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveCliGui.ps1”, “$o\odriveCliGui.ps1”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile <<<< (“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveSync.lnk”, “$HOME\sendto\odriveSync.lnk”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/odrivecli-win”, “$o\oc.zip”);$shl=new-object -com shell.application; $shl.namespace(“$o”).copyhere($shl.namespace(“$o\oc.zip”).items(),0x10);del “$o\oc.zip”;}
CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: ( , MethodInvocationException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : DotNetMethodException
& {$o=“$HOME.odrive\common”;(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveCliGui.ps1”, “$o\odriveCliGui.ps1”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveSync.lnk”, “$HOME\sendto\odriveSync.lnk”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile <<<< (“https://dl.odrive.com/odrivecli-win”, “$o\oc.zip”);$shl=new-object -com shell.application; $shl.namespace(“$o”).copyhere($shl.namespace(“$o\oc.zip”).items(),0x10);del “$o\oc.zip”;}
CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: ( , MethodInvocationException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : DotNetMethodException
& {$o=“$HOME.odrive\common”;(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveCliGui.ps1”, “$o\odriveCliGui.ps1”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveSync.lnk”, “$HOME\sendto\odriveSync.lnk”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/odrivecli-win”, “$o\oc.zip”);$shl=new-object -com shell.application; $shl.namespace(“$o”).copyhere($shl.namespace(“$o\oc.zip”).items <<<< (),0x10);del “$o\oc.zip”;}
CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (items:String) , RuntimeException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvokeMethodOnNull
& {$o=“$HOME.odrive\common”;(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveCliGui.ps1”, “$o\odriveCliGui.ps1”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/cli_gui/odriveSync.lnk”, “$HOME\sendto\odriveSync.lnk”);(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(“https://dl.odrive.com/odrivecli-win”, “$o\oc.zip”);$shl=new-object -com shell.application; $shl.namespace(“$o”).copyhere($shl.namespace(“$o\oc.zip”).items(),0x10);del <<<< “$o\oc.zip”;}
CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (C:\Users.odrive\common\oc.zip:String) [Remove-Item], ItemNotFoundException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.RemoveItemCommand
In addition to those, the links to the .inf and the .bat file are no longer valid.
I did follow the links and got these three files.
After renaming the .download file to .lnk it has the icon shown under the odrive “send to” entry shown in the linked thread (but no legible formatting to look at what’s inside in a text editor). The .zip file contains an odrive.exe date-stamped February 6th 2024, and then there’s the powershell script.
The .lnk file goes in the “%userprofile%\appdata\roaming\microsoft\windows\sendto” folder. Where under “%userprofile%\.odrive” do the odrive.exe from the .zip archive and the .ps1 script file go? I understand that the .lnk send-to shortcut calls the powershell script, which then in turn runs the odrive.exe which is a GUI for a sync client?
Hi @hmdb ,
Here is a new version of the alternate context menu (“SendTo”) options:
Right-click on the extracted Install-OdriveCliGui.ps1 and select “Run with PowerShell”.
See the INSTALL.txt file for more info.
This will add 3 new options to the SendTo context menu for sync, refresh, and unsync.
Very nice, it’s working! Thanks awfully for your help with this. 
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