"Move to Trash" missing in Context Menu Snow Leopard?

Since migrating to a new Mac and from Leopard to Snow Leopard, I have noted a few bugs. In the Finder right clicking or control clicking on files or folders brings up two different menus. One menu is the "old" Leopard (and prior) choices and the alternate menu has only a few items.

The alternate context dialogue offers only Open, Copy, Duplicate, View Options and a greyed out Labels option. No "Move to Trash".

I did discover that I can alter the behavior in a Finder Window Column View by right-clicking on a different file or folder icon, continuing until the primary menu appears instead of the alternate. Subsequent right-click selections retain the primary menu for a while but the secondary menu is brought up randomly if other work is done.

It appears that there is a Finder preference at work - does anyone have a Terminal command to force the primary to be selected?

I've looked around but see nothing for this so I am posting and re-posting an earlier string that is archived.

mackedout

Sep 14, 2010 1:30 PM

10.6.4 Snow Leopard is driving me crazy with the wonky probs I keep encountering, especially in Finder. One big-time annoyance: Often when I right click on a file (or more often, a folder) name, I don't get the full context menu with the Move to Trash option. I can still trash the files, but must drag them to Trash. The context dialogue offers only Open, Copy, Duplicate, View Options and a greyed out Labels option. This definitely started with the update. This is not across the board behavior. I do get the same context menu as in the past on many files/folders. I can ascertain no rhyme or reason to what makes the difference, or why, suddenly, the context menu is different. I've tried clicking directly on the icon and just on file name to see whether made a difference. I did that because another new problem is that when dragging, I have park the drag right on the icon (not just the file name) in order to successfully drop.

There's one more oddity in right-click contextual menu. I was in a protected sparse bundle disk image when this started happening today. I regularly add and delete files from the disk image. Today, some folders I could get get full context menu, many not. I came here to ask Mac users for help, but then returned to Finder briefly, moved around, then back to the sparse bundle disk image thinking to take one more look at those problematic folders. This time, there were NO problematic folders. I got the full context menu for every last one of them!

Note that I have at times deliberately changed directories in Finder and returned to one of that kind of file/folder, attempting to see whether that would make a difference i the context menu -- it never has before. Today it did. I was thinking something was happening with the properties of a specific file, but if I can get the context menu on a given file at one point, but not another (within only a few minutes) it wouldn't seem to be specific-file related, but rather something else going on in Finder. I am stymied.

Mac Mini 2.66 GHz Inte Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.4)