Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

Covering Your Tracks

In nearly every part of the interface, Windows keeps a history of your activity, from a drop-down list of typed commands in the Address Bar to the Recent Documents list in the Start Menu. The problem is there's no apparent way to control this record-keeping. Using the Registry and a number of tricks, it's possible to control some of these features and even wipe out the history at your whim.

Note that the drop-down list that appears in File-Save and File-Open dialogs when you type into the File name field is not actually a history of previously selected or typed files. Instead, it's an auto-complete mechanism that fills in the field as you type, using the names of the files in the current folder.

Taming Recent Documents

Every time you double-click a document in Explorer or on your desktop, Windows places a shortcut to the file in your Recent Documents folder. At any given time, you might have a few hundred shortcuts in there, effectively tracing your every action when sorted by date.

The contents of this folder are used to populate the Recent Documents menu in the Start Menu (just called Documents if the Classic Start Menu is used), as well as the handful of recent documents shown in the File menu of some applications (such as Microsoft Office 2002). The contents of the Recent folder are also accessible, by default, from the Places Bar shown in most file dialogs (discussed later in this chapter).

These solutions should help you tame the Recent Documents list.

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