Touch screens and menu placement

In Windows 8, if your computer has a touch screen, it defaults to placing context menus to the left of your cursor (like in the first image below) rather than the right of it. Grand, go into the Tablet PC Settings and change it to "left handed" to correct it. But it doesn't stick, as soon as a new batch of Windows updates come out, it goes back to "right handed" again.

The images are from Windows Server 2012 R2 but Windows 8.1 is affected too. Simply connecting to my 2012 R2 box from my touch screen laptop via RDP causes the menus to shift on the server.

I'm finding it a bit annoying to have to change this setting every month, is there a permanent fix?

Overheal

i feel like you should be able to write a .BAT file if nothing else, leave that on your desktop and it could let you change the setting in one double tap

Fysh

Overheal wrote: »

i feel like you should be able to write a .BAT file if nothing else, leave that on your desktop and it could let you change the setting in one double tap

I can't find anything on how to set it programmatically, but this post explains how to access the relevant menu from the Run bar. I'm going to see if I can find where the change is recorded in the registry, because at that point it's a trivial startup script in powershell to ensure it's set correctly.

Fysh

OK, so checking the differences in registry values for each setting on my test system suggests that the setting is recorded under:

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]

as a REG_SZ key named MenuDropAlignment, with 0 matching left-handed and 1 matching right-handed.

Which is easy enough to set in PowerShell using the Registry Provider, so a script set to run at logon and set the value should have you sorted. I've tested the following script on my Server 2012 R2 test box as a scheduled task and it seems to have worked, so it should sort you out.

Set-location HKLM:
try{
    Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows" -Name MenuDropAlignment -value 0
    Write-Host "MenuDropAlignment Value reset for left-handed configuration."
    Start-Sleep 10
} catch {
    Write-Host "Unable to set MenuDropAlignment value, error returned was "$_.Exception.Message
    Start-Sleep 10
}

You only actually need the set-location and set-ItemProperty lines - the rest is just trying to make sure that you can see the outcome and the error message in the event of a failure for any reason.

Edit: I don't understand why, but after another reboot my script & scheduled task aren't working. Bizarre. I'll keep poking at it.

Fysh

I'm very confused by this - the registry values are being set, but the values displayed by the Tablet Options menu don't match the changes. There's a .NET Assembly called System.Windows with a SystemParameters class that includes a MenuDropAlignment property. I can't find how to set the value of this property at the moment, but it's worth trying as an alternative approach.

Cheers Fysh, I appreciate your time on this but don't break yourself if you can't.