Removing Items from the Documents Menu

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The Documents menu contains a shortcut to your My Documents folder, as well as shortcuts to 15 of your most recently used documents. You can prune individual items from the Documents menu in the same way that you remove items from other parts of the Start menu: right-click an item and choose Delete from the shortcut menu.

SEE ALSO

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For information about the location of Start menu items, see "Taking Advantage of User Profiles."

Notice when you remove an item in this way, however, that the Documents menu still contains 15 items! (This is true only if you've opened more than 15 documents since you started using your computer or since you last cleared the Documents menu.) That's because the Documents menu reflects the contents of a hidden folder called Recent, which is stored as part of your user profile. Windows keeps shortcuts to all recently used documents in the Recent folder but displays only the most recent 15 on the Documents menu.

To clear the whole menu, including the backup supply of shortcuts:

1. Click the Start button, point to Settings, and choose Taskbar & Start Menu.
2. In the Taskbar And Start Menu Properties dialog box, click the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Clear button.

Note that you can't add items to the Documents menu by making direct additions to the Recent folder. For the purposes of building this menu, Windows simply ignores anything in the Recent folder that it didn't put there itself. When you use the Clear command, however, everything in the Recent folder is deleted, no matter how it got there.