Remove Unnecessary Entries From The New File Menu

You see lots of file types when you right click and select new from the context menu. I will never need most of them and I think this is a common problem for most windows xp users. How many users would need the briefcase entry in that menu for instance ? I don´t know a single person who would use that entry on this machine.

The best way would be to remove all unnecessary entries from the dialog and add new usefull entries. Doing that is really simple. You need to know the file extension of the file that you want to delete, if you are not sure create a new file of that type and you will see the extension. Let us remove the Microsoft Powerpoint entry from the new file menu as an example.
Click start, run, enter regedit and hit enter. Search for .ppt which is the extension for microsoft powerpoint application files. Backup the entry first selecting file and then export from the menu. If you delete something accidentaly you can recover it by importing the backup again. Locate the ShellNew and delete it after you created a backup. Deleting the ShellNew key removes the entry from the new file menu.

Repeat the above steps (backup the key, locate ShellNew, delete ShellNew) for all extensions that you do not use. Briefcase is a special case. It has no extension, locate Briefcase in the registry, it should be below all your extensions in the same in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Backup and delete the whol Briefcase entry to remove it from the file menu.

Adding files to the New menu:

Adding files to the new menu is really easy as well. You need to know the extension of the file that you want to add, let us use .htm as an example- Navigate to the .htm key and create a new key called ShellNew. Create a new String (REG_SZ)in the right area of ShellNew and name it Nullfile. This means that a file with zero bytes will be created whenever you choose to create a new .htm file from the context menu.