This is one of the things I detest most in MS Office apps.  The dreaded “Adaptive Menus.”  And yet, after all these years, they continue to come back and haunt me.  I just want them gone!  They started showing up the other day in Outlook 2007.  Then I noticed them in Project.  Where were they coming from?

They are controlled by the Tools | Customize menu option.  All you should have to do is check “Always show full menus” checkbox and you should be done.  I did this repeatedly, but every time I started Outlook, it went away.

The setting is actually in the registry under AdaptiveMenus in the following key path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars

Each time I started Outlook I could see it come back (AdaptiveMenus=1) by pressing F5 to refresh the registry editor (REGEDIT) after starting Outlook.  I started hunting around and decided to look at the Add-ins that were loading.  To do this, open the Trust Center under the Tools menu. 

I only had three Add-ins loading and I knew I wanted to keep Kaspersky (anti-virus).  I didn’t think the Outlook VBA Add-in would be a problem.  After fiddling around a little, I found that deselecting the magicJack Add-in would prevent this problem from recurring. 

Now I’ve got my full menus back and they are STICKY!  Yeah!  It’s the little things in life…