Privacy concern: Explorer browsing dialog remembers recent locations

[Aelius]

There's a major privacy concern in Windows 7 that I'm hoping I can get advice on avoiding.

Everyone knows how common it is in every application to have to choose to Open or Save As or Import/Export or in some other way get prompted by a small Explorer window to locate whatever it is you need to find (a picture to add as a Skype avatar, a folder to save your Word document, an audio file to use as a custom sound for some program, whatever, there are hundreds of possibilities.)

The problem is that in almost every single case it opens a recently used directory by default. I haven't quite figured out exactly how it decides which directory to default to, but it happens very often where I'm prompted to find, say, an audio file and it opens the little Explorer dialogue and immediately defaults to my deeply-nested porn collection, or some obscure AppData location I visited recently.

This has obvious privacy implications, and not just for porn collections. Use your imagination.

So, is there any way to have it default to nothing or some other way to get around this privacy Russian Roulette of sorts?

(I know this is not unique to Windows 7 and I know this isn't anything new, I just never bothered to figure it out until now.)

Thanks.

 

[Brink]

Hello Aelius,

If you like, the tutorial below can help show you how to disable the tracking of recent items and programs.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/104503-recent-items-enable-disable.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/32666-recent-programs-enable-disable.html

 

[Aelius]

Hello Aelius,

If you like, the tutorial below can help show you how to disable the tracking of recent items and programs.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/104503-recent-items-enable-disable.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/32666-recent-programs-enable-disable.html

No, that's not what I was talking about. I specifically mentioned the Explorer dialogue that comes up within applications when you need to open, save, export, import, and so on.

 

[Wandering one]

MS seems to revert to the previous save location, "seems" being the operative for MS. Anyhow I always save to desktop and triage from there.
Art.