I had this happen to me as well. I've found two ways this can happen:
1) You have a filter active. If you then right click a hook where no items matches your selected filter, no window shows up and you therefore can't perform a "pickup" (or rotate or whatever it is, that you were hoping to do).
2) You've been picking up items of a certain Category and Subcategory. If you then right-click a new type of node that has zero matches, you end up in the same situation as above.
Had me baffled for a while as well.
Solution: Press the "clear" button on the filter, and make sure Category and Subcategory is set to "All". Then right click the node again, and things go back to normal.