FIxing Win10 Taskbar Context for Putty

By | April 8, 2017

I recently upgraded Putty on my Windows 10 machine to the latest 64 bit version. After doing so, I was disconcerted to discover that I could no longer right-click its taskbar icon to  see a list of sites I had connected to previously.

This was reminiscent of when I first installed Win10 and had the same issue. A little research and I found a solution that worked for me, and I’m sharing it here hoping it might help someone else as well.

Here’s how I fixed it:

  1. I unpinned Putty from the taskbar.
  2. I started Putty running. Then, while it was running, I right clicked its icon on the taskbar and clicked “Pin to Taskbar”, thus repinning it to the taskbar.
  3. I closed Putty.

That’s it! After that, there right-click context menu showed up for Putty and I was a happy camper once again.

By the way, if you haven’t upgraded to Putty 0.68, you should. It contains support for elliptic-curve cryptography and has a 64 bit Windows version, plus a few vulnerability fixes. While you’re at it, consider upgrading all your SSH keys to ED25519 elliptic curves. Your old RSA and DSA 1024 bit keys are vulnerable and deprecated. I found this article to be very useful in explaining how to upgrade.

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