Thread: Create a Shortcut to Delete Recent Items in Windows Vista (or XP’s) Start Menu

Have you ever attempt going through all of the menus necessary to delete the Recent Items in the XP Start Menu? It takes forever, mainly when you want to hide anything you must not have been doing. As usual, there is an easy way to do it.

just right-click the recent items and select “Clear Recent Items List”. XP is the only one with a group of menus to go through. Either way this must work the same across both versions.

You can manually open the shell folder and delete the items, or you can utilize the script I give that will actually give you a shortcut to the latest entries with nothing more than a double is deleted.

Just to be very clear, this is the list of items that we will be clearing out:



Where Is the Recent Folder so I Can Delete Them Manually?

Like many folders in Windows, this is a hidden away under your profile folder. The full path to Windows Vista would replace your username in the path:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\ Recent\

If you use the command line, you can use the% APPDATA% environment variable to the path without the user know.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\

Or the simplest possible method is to type in this shell shortcut into the address bar or start menu search box:

shell:recent



You can delete all items from this folder, or all items. You see them withdraw from the recent menu instantly. Again, these are just shortcuts to the actual file, as shown in the Type column above.

Clear Out the Recent Items With a Shortcut

With a little bit of Windows Script Host magic we can create a script that removes the items in the current folder .it only takes four lines of code!

Create a new file called Delete Recent Items.js with Notepad and paste the following lines or download the zip file attached below.

var fso = WScript.CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”) ;
var WSH = new ActiveXObject(”WScript.Shell”);
var folder = WSH.SpecialFolders(”Recent”);
fso.DeleteFile(folder + “\\*.*”);

Once you save the file, you should now have a new icon that can be double-clicked to clear the recent items.



To assign a new icon or a shortcut to add, you require a shortcut to the file. I would suggest set the script file in a folder anywhere, and then making a shortcut to your desktop or Quick Launch folder.

Once you have created the shortcut, you can right-click and select Properties and then click Change Icon and add a shortcut if you wish.