Dealing with a faulty QTTabBar uninstaller

A while back, back when I used Windows 10, I installed this great program called QTTabBar. It was great, because it allowed me to have multiple tabs open in file explorer, greatly improving my productivity. However, after updating to Windows 11, the program started to have conflicts with the built-in tabs that the nex explorer now includes, and since tabs were built-in, I could now uninstall this program.

Unfortunately, the uninstaller tool for it seems to do a particularly poor job at cleaning up after itself, because it left a tonne of random files and registry entries for QTTabBer which were messing up with my file explorer.

The Problem

Every time I double-clicked on a folder from file explorer, it opened on a new window instead of opening in-place. This was particularly annoying because it broke back/forwards functionality within the explorer, and made it really annoying to use.

The Solution

First off, I used everything which is a program that indexes your entire drive for blazingly fast searching of files, and searched for QTTabBar, and proceeded to go around deleting all the files and folders with that name. Great, now I had less bloat on my system because of useless files, however the problem at hand still persisted.

After looking around on the web, I found out that the issue was because the uninstaller also left some registry entries dotted about, which added a context menu item when right-clicking on a folder. I presume this was bound to opening the folder in a new tab, but now that the program is gone, it seems to default to opening a new window instead. It was specifically the following path in the registry editor that contained a lot of entries pertaining QTTabBar:

Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell

After deleting these, and then going around using the search tool in the Registry Editor to delete a bunch that referenced QTTabBar (and then killing and reopening Explorer), my PC was back to normal.

Note: DO NOT delete random registry entries if you don't know what you're doing (I don't) OR if you don't know how to fix it up if you do delete something important (I do). Do this at your own risk.

Published on 2025-06-01. Opinions? Criticism? tell me!