There is however another place that stores the most recent documents. This one is located in the Registry and it stores way more information. The Registry key is called OpenSaveMRU and stores a history of files that have been opened in a common dialog box. All information are stored in sub-keys. The * sub-key contains a list of all files while the keys with file extensions contain only information about files with that extension.

The only way that I discovered to remove those information is to clear all sub-keys of this Registry key. There is probably a more elegant way to do this, maybe a hidden Registry setting that disables it but I was not able to discover it yet.

You can open the Windows Registry to take a look at the key. To do that press Windows R, type regedit and hit enter. Now navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Explorer \ComDlg32 and left-click on the key OpenSaveMRU.

The easiest way is to use a Registry file that clears all the sub-keys immediately. I did create and upload the Registry script for you. Just download the registry script and double-click it (or execute it with regedit /s edit.reg). You could also save it and take a look at it before you execute it which is always a good precaution.

It seems that the sub-keys will not be regenerated after a restart.

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Maybe you feel the same way I do about this “feature” and don’t need and want it on your system. I managed to find a way to disable it completely which has the effect that Windows is not recording the most recent files that are opened. I first tried to disable it in the Group Policy Editor but it was only possible to reduce it to 1 record which was not sufficient.

I discovered a Registry key however that disables the Recent Documents completely. To access it you need to open the Registry Editor by pressing Windows R, typing regedit and hitting enter.

Now navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \Explorer and right-click in the right pane. Select New > Dword and name it NoRecentDocsHistory. Change the value of that setting to 1 to disable the Recent Documents.

I did use Recent Files View to verify that Windows is not storing any information about recently opened documents anymore.

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Some users prefer to remove the Recent Documents altogether for several reasons. Maybe the computer is used by more than one user and the profile is shared – believe me that seems to happen a lot of times in families – or if you borrow someone a computer without creating a new profile for him or, my favorite, if you want to eliminate the chance that someone could see the Recent Documents on your computer at work.

The amount of Recent Documents that are shown can be changed in the Word options (Excel options..). You can access them from the same menu. Click on the big Office button in the upper left corner and select the Word Options button which is located right under Recent Documents.

Click on the Advanced tab in the right menu and scroll down – way down – until you find the Display part of the settings. There is an entry entitled “Show this number of Recent Documents” and a number next to it. If you change that number to 0 Microsoft Office 2007 will not remember the last used documents and will not display them in the Recent Documents pane anymore.

The Recent Documents entries should get reduced immediately which means that you do not have to manually delete them. But, a big one, this is only valid for the application where you changed it. So, if you change the number of Recent Documents that are shown in Word 2007 you will only reduce it for Word 2007 and not for Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 and all the other applications.

There is no global way to handle this which means that you will have to open each application once and change the Recent Documents setting for this application.

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