Windows is keeping track of which programs you opened recently. It is using two locations to store those information. The first are the 15 most recently opened documents that are stored in the user profile and I already wrote an article on how to disable the recent documents listing in Windows.
There is however another place [...]

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I reviewed the Nirsoft application Recent Files View yesterday which brought two possible privacy leaks to my attention. Windows is keeping a record of files that have been previously opened, to be precise of the 15 most recent files that have been opened and stores them as shortcuts in the hidden folder Recent [My Recent [...]

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The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.

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