The recent items that are displayed can be a security and privacy risk. Even more so as there are no obvious means to delete and manage them effectively. The only option that a user has is to right-click specific recent items in the jumplist for options to delete that item.

There is no option to delete all items or to exclude items from being displayed in the jumplist.

What most Windows 7 users do not know is that Microsoft is storing the recent items list in a super-hidden directory that cannot be accessed directly in Windows Explorer. One of the options to access that directory is to copy and paste the following path into the Windows Explorer address bar.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

This will display a list of encoded file. Each file contains the information of a specific jumplist. It is however not easy to link those files to a jumplist. The only viable way to do that is to open the items in that folder in a text editor and search for recent items that are in the jumplist currently.

An easier way is to delete all files in the directory which will remove all recent items in every jumplist. This process can be automated with the command

del %appdata%\microsoft\windows\recent\automaticdestinations\*

Experienced users can add this to the Windows Task Scheduler to run the command on every shutdown of the system. (via How To Clear Recent Jumplist Items at Windows 7 News)

A few software programs are available to view and delete the contents of index.dat files. We have mentioned some of them earlier here at Ghacks like the index.dat viewer or the index.dat suite. Another tool for the purpose is the index.dat analyzer which can display and clean the contents of index.dat files as well.

If you want to prevent that Windows is writing data to those files in future sessions you need to set the file attribute to read-only. Another possibility would be to run CCleaner regularly (this can be automated) to clean the index.dat files.

What Microsoft has not taken into account are privacy sensitive users who do not like this type of information recorded on their system. The cleaner MRU Blaster takes care of the most recently updated files in Windows by deleting the information in Windows.

CCleaner was used to test the effectiveness of MRU Blaster by cleaning Windows with it before running MRU Blaster. Even after cleaning the system with CCleaner the program did find 257 entries that could be additionally cleaned on the system.

The user can specify the applications and locations that should be scanned and cleaned in the program’s settings which is also the location to download the two available plugins that clean cookies and temporary files.

MRU Blaster comes with a scheduler that can be set to run in specified intervals. The application has to be running in the background for this though.

The real problem that arises is that past icons are kept there as well which means that everyone can access these information which could be a privacy problem.

Custom Notifications can be accessed by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing Properties from the menu. Click on the Customize button next to the Hide inactive icons entry to see all active and past entries in there – you might be surprised about the amount of icons listed there.

Microsoft does not offer an elegant way to clean past Custom Notifications items which is why I would recommend the Open Source software Past Icons Flusher which cleans all past icons when executed.

The software has a size of only 19K and can be executed from any location, no installation needed.