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Tweak of the week: Control the recent documents menu

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Tweak #14 - november 7, 2001

Whenever you open a document from Explorer, this file is added to "Documents" in the start menu.
You might not want this, because this enables people to see which documents you have been accessing.

This set of tweaks gives you several possibilities for preventing this: Disable the Documents menu completely, disable updating the menu or clearing it when you log off.

The tweak

Go to the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies

Look for the following subkey:

Explorer

If it doesn't exist, create it.

Navigate to the Explorer key.

To disable the documents menu completely, look for this value:

NoRecentDocsMenu

To disable automatic updates, look for this value:

NoRecentDocsHistory

To clear the menu on logoff, look for this value:

ClearRecentDocsOnExit

If the value you're looking for doesn't exist, create it as a DWORD value.

Set this value to 1. To disable the tweak again, change the value back to 0 or delete the value.

Download reg file to disable the menu completely

Download tweak14a.reg

Download reg file to disable automatic updates

Download tweak14b.reg

Download reg file to clear on logoff

Download tweak14c.reg

Download reg file to restore the defaults

Download tweak14_restore.reg