Windows 10: PuTTY does not work correctly with the taskbar context menu?

Question

When right clicking on the PuTTY icon in the Windows 10 taskbar, I get recent connections. Clicking on one of those just opens the PuTTY main page. Instead of connecting to that connection.

Is it me? How could I change that?

Solution 1

This is a known issue with PuTTY 0.65 and older on Windows 10. See PuTTY bug win10-jumplists.

It seem to be a bug in Windows 10 triggered by PuTTY using the @ sign at the beginning of its command-line arguments used in jumplist shortcuts.

---

A workaround for the Windows 10 bug has been implemented and was released with PuTTY 0.66:
https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/putty.git;a=commit;h=8bf5c1b31f1a1449d694e3604e293b0831eb2657

Download here:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Note that, it won't magically fix existing pinned sites. You have to re-pin them.

Solution 2

I also updated to the latest version of Putty (v. 0.67) and found that it still did not work (even after re-pining). However, I realized that I had to remove all my Recent Sessions for it to work properly.

I did the following:

• Unpin Putty from the taskbar
• Start Putty and re-pin it to the taskbar.
• Close Putty
• Right-click the Putty icon on the taskbar.
• Right-click each of the items in Recent Sessions and select Remove from this list)

This fixed it for me (all the steps might not be entirely necessary, but better safe than sorry).

Solution 3

If you find yourself in the same boat as me, which is that updated versions of PuTTy do not fix this issue, you can use the following workaround that I found here:

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/07/10-practical-putty-tips-and-tricks-you-probably-didnt-know/.

• Create a new PuTTY windows shortcut
• Rename this shortcut to your favorite name.
  • example: dev-db.
• Right-click on this shortcut and select properties.
• In the Target field, at the end append “-load putty-session-name”
  • example: "C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\putty.exe" -load dev-db
• Right-click the shortcut again and choose "Pin to Taskbar"
• You can now delete or move the shortcut, if you wish

This will be an additional putty taskbar item if you already had the standard putty pinned to taskbar. Since I only use one putty session every time, I deleted the original putty taskbar pin. If you have multiple connections you want to pin, then you would repeat the above steps for each one and would probably want to change the shortcut icons for each to differentiate.

Comments

[Kristoffer]

Using the development snapshot fixes the problem for me.

[hsmiths]

It is still broken for me.

[hsmiths]

correction: pinned sites are broken, but recent sites work. unpin/repin fixed it.

[Jingo]

Sadly it will not work for me :(, tried "re-pinning", still no luck...

[Jingo]

Yes I did upgrade to the development snapshot. Edit: This is some foul magic, all of a sudden it works... I cant explain why... strange

[WoodyDRN]

I didn't work for me only to download the development version, the magic word was "You have to re-pin them" - which worked like magic :D

[Novocaine]

Re-pinned with regular version worked for me.

[Kyle]

Just want to throw my hat in the ring here, I updated to 0.66 but it still doesn't work for me.

[Martin Prikryl]

@Kyle Did you re-pin the sites?

[Kyle]

@MartinPrikryl, yes I did. Just want to note that using the development version is the only way I got it to work. If you use the latest stable 0.66 (which according to release notes) fixes this issue, it still does not work. However, the latest developer edition does fix the issue.

[Robin Smidsrød]

Actually, if you have too many pinned jumplist items then you won't see any items in the Recent Sessions list.

[trigras]

This worked for me even without the last step (putty 0.67, Windows 10)

[Amit Tandel]

Cannot remove recent. Does nothing. The recent sessions I don't mind, but I am not able to pin favorites so they stay at top. WHich is whole reason I investigated this. Small thing but annoying. I am sure the registry prob needs cleanup from previous installs/runs.