This issue has been perplexing myself, and others. A person with the handle of “Laconicus” imparted the wisdom:

“One of the Verisign Code-Signing CRLs is due to be updated today (as of 8th Jan, midnight GMT), and your computer hanging for a few seconds when you right-click a file (or try to delete something using the delete key) is caused by Explorer, for some reason, deciding that it’s a good time to go check for an updated version of this file.

My guess is that with so many of Windows machines attempting to get this file every time someone has right clicked a file or folder, that the server that hosts the file simply can’t take handle the load. Hopefully within a few days they’ll get their act together, and get the server back online.”

What does this mean? If you set your click back, say, a week, everthing will return to normal. Of course this is not an elegant solution, but hopefully it will be fixed shortly.l