Unable to pin stuff to taskbar/start menu

Hello Eax, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Do you have Recent Items and Recent Programs turned on?

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hey maybe your permissions are not right on the registry, I wonder what else you can't acecss?

See attached pic how to edit your permissions in the registry.
Mine has ALLOW for myself, administrators and system. + READ ONLY for RESTRICTED.

It may also be worthwhile to do a SFC /SCANNOW from an elevated command prompt to make sure that all of your windows protected files are intact.

eax said:

How should the permissions be in the registry to be "right"?

I'm running SFC /SCANNOW currently :)

The same as mine :)
FULL CONTROL + READ (nothing in Special permissions)
yourself
administrators
system

READ ONLY
restricted

SFC
Hmm, it repaired a lot, but had some errors. Where there any messages on the screen after it completed?
If you want to repair the other errors, you can run it again, but purge the cache fist to delete the corrupted backups that show in the log.
1. RUN CMD as administrator
2. SFC /PURGECACH
3. SFC /SCANNOW
OR There are some tuturials on this page about vista that you could try cbs.log

I'd focus on the registry for now though.
Registry
Go one step back on the tree and alter the permissions, as long as yourself, administrators and system have access and there are no deny's it's all good.
Then try the reg patch.

Good Luck.

The thing I can't work out is that I have soooo much more information under explorer. I'm wondering if this has to do with the 64bit OS that I have (but it doesn't really make sense to me).

If anyone else is reading this, can you comment on your registry settings for explorer?

EDIT: Maybe because mine is ultimate edition... hmm.