How to Clear the Recently Run Programs List

If you’re willing to clear the Recent Documents list, too, there’s a nice, easy way to clear the list. Right-click the taskbar and choose Properties. Click the Start menu tab and click the Customize button next to whichever Start menu option is active. If you use the Classic Start menu, simply click the Clear button. If you use the Microsoft Windows XP Start menu, click the Advanced tab and then click the Clear List button. (Yes, I know it doesn’t say that it also clears the Run list, but it does.) Now just click Cancel, Cancel—you’re not actually changing any settings.

If you need to automate the cleanup process, or if you must clear the Run list while leaving Recent Documents intact, you can do it with a Registry script. Launch Notepad and enter these two lines:

REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft \Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU]

That really is just two lines; line two consists of everything between the square brackets [ ], though it may be wrapped for printing or display. Save this file as “norunmru.reg” including the quotes (without the quotes Notepad might call it norunmru.reg.txt). To clear the MRU list, launch the file, answer Yes, and click OK.

The list in the Registry is now gone, but Windows Explorer still has it in memory. In order to get rid of it, you must do one of three things: You can restart or shut down Windows. You can log out and log in again. Or you can kill the Explorer.exe process using Task Manager, and then launch Explorer.exe again by choosing File | New Task (Run . . . ) from Task Manager’s menu. This last option may wipe out the system-tray icons for some background programs, so it’s not really recommended.

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