@winsev, Thanks for the registry key's I'll take a look at those in addition to the ones I already identified, and report back on the function (been digging, and plan on continuing to).
@VirtualPenguin, thanks for responding. Really I do appreciate the assistance both for the little rabbit hole I'm traveling down, and for helping the original poster of the article. But, sadly I myself am not looking for a 3rd party application to solve this issue. Others may be. I've seen and tried CSmenu as well as others menu apps before posting here. I really just want to find a pure reg edit solution that can be scripted (as a third party menu app is not going to be sufficient in a professional office deployment. This is just my opinion). I'm operating under the assumption, or at least the suspicion that one of these situations maybe a hold a possible path to the desired solution;
A: the "recent programs" list is controlled by/contains a registry key that can be redirected to a different location (such as the program shortcut directory). A long shot, and I'm a bit doubtful this is the case but it's the cleanest solution. (requires confirming the “recent programs” key)
B. There is a way to add an entry (dword) to the key that controls the "all programs" button in start that sets it to active (simulates a mouse click) permanently. This is not as clean in my opinion as option A, but would accomplish
the desired result. (need to identify the key for the “all programs” button if one even exsists).
My current work around is to “send to (create shortcut)” the entire program shortcut directory to the desktop, then move each program (one at a time) to the start menu and “pin” them (after seeting recen items to “0”). This works, but is time consuming. The “recent” list is useless in my opinion, and not very functional to our particular users. I'll admit that I'm coming back to Windows from Ubuntu, and have learned to manipulate GNOME extensively over the last few years since Vista's release (having said that I'm aware I may be expecting too much). But still, I've got a fair bit of experience in the Windows environment, and I'm sure there is a way (via a registry key or otherwise) to accomplish desired result (a .reg file that can be run on a new system and correct/change the start menu function post install).
