How can I remove the Documents menu?

A. There is no way to remove the Documents menu from the Start button without Active Desktop installed and you have to empty it at the start of each session. With Windows 98 you can remove the Documents menu.

1. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe)
2. Move to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
3. From the Edit menu select New - DWORD value
4. Enter a name of NoFavoritesMenu and press Enter
5. Double click the new value and set to 1. Click OK
6. Close the registry editor

Log off and on again and the Docuements menu is gone.

For NT you will have to perform the following:

The documents menu is actually the contents of %systemroot%\Profiles\<username>\Recent, e.g. d:\winnt\Profiles\savillj\Recent, and if you delete the contents of this folder then nothing will be shown in the documents menu. The easiest way to do this would be to create a batch file and place it in you startup group

1. Start Notepad
2. Enter into the file
   del /q %systemroot%\Profiles\%username%\Recent\*.*
   actually type the %systemroot% and %username% unless you are performing this on a Windows 95 machine in which case you should type in real values.
3. Save the file as "deldoc.bat" (put the file name in quotes or notepad will add .txt to the end) in a directory of you choice
4. Start Explorer
5. Move to the folder you saved deldoc.bat to and right click on it.
6. Drag the file to the %systemroot%\Profiles\%username%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup (e.g. d:\winnt\Profiles\savillj\etc..) and release. Select "create shortcut here" from the displayed context menu

When you login from now on the batch file will be run and delete your Documents menu.

The same effect can be gained if you have TweakUI installed by clicking the Paranoia tab and checking "Clear Document history at logon"

If you have Active Desktop in NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 using TweakUI 98, select the IE tab and unselect the 'Show Documents on Start Menu'. This can also be done by directly editing the registry and setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsMenu to 1 (of type REG_BINARY).

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