There's not room in this hack to go into detail about each of the settings you can change, so I'll tell you about some of my favorites. I've never been a big fan of My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music. In fact, I never use those folders, so there's no point having them on
the Start Menu. The settings in the Group Policy Editor let you get rid of them.
If you share your PC with other people, the Group Policy Editor is a great way to make sure that no one can change the Start Menu and Taskbar except you. So when you have the Start Menu and Taskbar working the way you like, they'll stay that way until you want to change them. Enable "Prevent changes to Taskbar and Start Menu Settings," and no one will be able to change their settings except you. Select "Remove Drag-and-drop context menus on the Start Menu," and no one except you will be able to remove or reorder items on the Start Menu. You can even stop anyone else from shutting down Windows by selecting "Remove and prevent access to the Shut Down command." (Of course, they can still shut down your PC the old-fashioned way: using the power switch.)
Among the many entries here are a lot of pointless ones, by the way. You can remove the Log Off entry on the Start Menu, for example, which certainly isn't high on my list of must-haves. But who knows, you may want to do that or any of the many other changes the Group Policy Editor allows. Go in there yourself and muck around; you'll find plenty to change.
2.4.1 Hack the Taskbar with TweakUI
TweakUI [Hack #8] can be used to hack the Taskbar to a limited degree. Go to its Taskbar section, and you can disable or enable balloon tips, and enable or disable warnings when you're low on disk space. Underneath the Taskbar section, you'll find a Grouping subsection that controls how Taskbar "grouping" works. When you run too many programs with too many files open, all can't fit individually on the Taskbar. So, XP groups files from the same application with each other. For example, if you have four Word files open, it shows only a single icon for Word on the Taskbar, with the number 4 inside it. Click on the icon, and a list of all four files pops up. You can then choose which to open. TweakUI lets you control how that grouping works; you can decide whether to first group
applications with the most windows, or instead first group applications that you use the least. You can also choose to group all applications with two or more windows open, three or more windows open, and so on.
[ Team LiB ]
Hack 11 Clean Up the Most Frequently Used Programs List
Make this infrequently used tool useful. Ban programs from the Most Frequently Used Programs List, change the number of programs on the list, or do away with it altogether to make more room for the Pinned Programs List.
Windows keeps track of programs you use frequently and puts them on the Most Frequently Used Programs List, which appears on the new Windows XP-style Start Menu (not the Classic-style Start Menu) between the Pinned Items List at the top and the All Programs link at the bottom. The Most Frequently Used Programs List is a quick way to access programs you use often. But the rules for when programs appear on that list and disappear from the list are murky at best, and there appears to be no logic to what programs appear there.
There is some hidden logic, however. XP bans a variety of programs from the list. If any of the following words or phrases are included in the program's shortcut name, the program will be excluded from the list: Documentation, Help, Install, More Info, Readme, Read me, Read First, Setup, Support, What's New.
Additionally, the following executables are excluded from the list: Setup.exe, Install.exe, Isuninst.exe, Unwise.exe, Unwise32.exe, St5unst.exe, Rundll32.exe, Explorer.exe, Icwconn1.exe, Inoculan.exe, Mobsync.exe, Navwnt.exe, Realmon.exe, and Sndvol32.exe.
2.5.1 Banning Programs from the List
There may be other programs you'd like to ban from the list, not just those that XP bans by default. Just because you use a program a time or two doesn't mean that you want it in on the Start Menu's Most Frequently Used Programs List. You can ban programs from the list using a Registry hack.
Run the Registry Editor [Hack #68] and go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications. Underneath this key, you'll find a series of subkeys, each of which represents an application. The primary purpose of these subkeys, as you'll see later in this hack, is to determine whether the program appears on the Open With dialog box that appears whenever you try to open an unknown file type. But you can also add a value to any of the subkeys which will ban programs from appearing on the Most Frequently Used Programs List.
Look for a subkey that is the executable name of the application that you want to ban from the list—for example, visio.exe for the Visio business illustration program. Once you find the application's subkey, create a new String value for that subkey, named NoStartPage. Leave the value blank. Exit the Registry. You may have to reboot in order for the setting to take effect and the program to be banned from the list.
2.5.1.1 Another use for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications
While you're rooting around in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications, you may want to hack the Open With dialog box (shown in Figure 2-6) that appears whenever you try to open an unknown file type. Each application's subkey in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications controls whether that particular application will show up on the dialog box.