In some applications (notably Visual Studio 2008, Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer) all of the menus open to the left of the cursor. In other apps (Firefox, ACDSee) they open to the right. Then there's Foxit Reader, where the ones in the menu bar open to the left and the context menu opens to the right.
This is very annoying. Is there a way to make everything open in the same direction? (preferably to the right) I'm running Vista Ultimate.
Isn't because the cursor is at the rightmost of the screen that makes it appear on the left?
They all open to the right for me. Have you got your internationalization settings set for a right to left language somehow?
In the Control Panel go to "Tablet PC Settings" in the "Mobile PC" category and, in the General Tab, select "Left-handed" to make the menus appear on the right side.
For IE7 / IE8 there has been much debate and criticism of MSFT's choice to make the Command bar (the one with home,page,tools etc. on it) be a Cascade-Menu-Left Toolbar.
In fact you can't even put it on the left side of the screen and have content on the same row after it... and even if you do, it still doesn't fix the menu cascade.
I'm not sure if this was your only issue or not, but I wouldn't take this applications usage of menus to be a "good" example.