Windows 7: Problem with Recent Programs list.

Now that you mention it, yes, I think so. They seem to show up eventually but not following the first access of a given program. I just manually added that key and value to the registry but haven't rebooted yet. I guess I'll see if that helps after next time I reboot. I already had recent programs properly set in start menu, properties, customize.

The only other key I have in the "advanced" folder is "taskbarsizemove." That seems odd considering all the stuff in there in your screenshot. However, I do have the "administrative tools" item showing up on the start menu, even though there is nothing about that in that advanced folder.

That's strange Peter. As a test, create a new administrator account to see if you have more than that in the Advanced folder while logged on to the new account.

Tried that and the Advanced folder in the new administrator account did seem to have the full number of items one would expect. 21 to be exact.

This is very odd, now I'm not sure what to do. Maybe run sfc?

Peter,

You can copy the contents of you old account's user folders into the corresponding new account's user folders. If everything checks out ok in the new account afterwards, then you can delete the old account from within the new one.

Well, I decided to just reinstall Windows 7 since I literally only had Firefox installed and the Recent Programs list is working as normal.

Thanks again for the help.

I'll give that a try. I would try anything to avoid doing a clean install as I have so many apps installed and tweaked, it would take me at least a couple of days of work to do a clean install and get everything the way I want it.

Could you be more specific about which folders I should copy from the old registry into the new registry? Or do you just mean, my user account folder that's not in the registry at all?

Well I tried doing what Shawn suggested above by copying my old user account over to the new administrator account's user account. Before it even completed the copying process (which would have taken all day according to the estimated time displayed), it changed the registry entry we were discussing above so it only contained the same (now two) entries that my original user account's registry contained. So the procedure did not have the desired effect and I canceled it before completion.

Unfortunately, I could not tell which item it was that was being copied over which caused the registry to change like that.

In the meantime, I toggled the store and display recent files checkboxes on and off and recent files are at least properly being retained and displayed, at least until the total number of items allowed is reached. After that I have a feeling it will go back to not replacing the oldest item with the most recent item very quickly again. At least everything else seems to be working normally without all those missing registry entries as far as I can tell.

Peter,

You will be copying the contents of the old user account's C:\Users\(user-name) folders into the corresponding new account's C:\Users\(user-name) folders. Not anything to do with the registry.

Yes, thanks. As I said above, I tried that and it changed the new registry to look just like the old one before it even got through copying the entire user account.

If you copied the registry, then yes it will have messed everything up. Did you copy only the user folders (suppose to), registry, or both?