This topic just now caught my eye by sheer chance. As someone who has gone into very nasty territory with regards to properly recreating context menus in as authentic a manner as possible (look up
Cautomaton if you're interested), I can tell you one thing: rocket science is more predictable.
Back before the Windows XP days, there was no API to properly summon a context menu. During some version of Windows XP, there was an internal API that got published as a part of a lawsuit deal in the EU, although it was hardly the most suitable thing. Around Vista, a 'better' API came out, and iirc Windows 7 improved on even that with yet more miracles. Even the latest API is not easy to use, and the ones before that are pure hell.
What I can tell you based on my experiments is that the ordering is both directly and indirectly based on the OS. Why indirectly? Because of those APIs I mentioned. Some of the old ones expect the calling applications to pass the relevant registry keys to them in an array... and the ordering of said array alone can shuffle things considerably. Throw in that the Windows versions actually brought in new features and other messes, and there is no such thing as a simple 'order' for context menu items. Of course, all this still ignores the marvel of the schzophrenic 32/64 bittiness that others have already mentioned.
Probably the most unreliable part of it all are the shell extensions that get loaded. In theory, it ought to be relatively simple in how they are implemented. But programmers do silly things out of sheer incompetence (or to please their bosses). Combined with all the differences that already exist between the Windows versions, these shell extensions can behave wildly different depending on the Windows version, even if they aren't version sniffing.
(And this is the point where I read some more posts in the topic and realize what you were really asking for...)
I think that the stuff you are looking for is really hard to do. Ignoring the wildcard that is dynamic verbs that could screw everything up, some results are possible.
For static verbs, it is basically a matter of automating what you do manually already in the various places (extension / file 'class'). Don't forget to keep an eye on the mime type (or wtf the registry key is called); it also affects the menu items that pop up (although this stuff may actually end up being dynamic, now that I think of it). Since it is pretty much all static in nature, there's no need to simulate anything and the registry gives you your answers.
For dynamic items, it is possible to manually try and figure out what the shell extension modules are, and then manually run them and try to create some results. But false positives would run rampant: ideally you'd want to feed it an empty context menu so that all the things it adds are the ones you are interested in. But if it does sniffing ('put me right underneath send-to' logic for example), that stuff could really backfire and it might not sniff up any items whatsoever.
I know this shit has given me many headaches, and my successes are completely based on tenacity and the blood and tears of others who have tread the path before me. Either way: what you want is not something that is a simple matter of just tearing out existing code. It involves recreating the Windows internals regarding context menus with enough precision to stave off all sorts of awkward edge cases. Even if a lot of the context menu could be simulatedly recreated using a 'phantom' file that kind of matches the criteria you are looking for, it will break, and you won't have your neat separation of 'X is located in All Folders, Y in All Directories, etc'.
All that said: I do not want to discourage you. But the depths of context menus are where masochists venture in need of their fix. That's all.
