Customizing the Start Menu on Windows XP Home Systems

By Dan DiNicolo, April 19th, 2007 Posted in Tweaking XP. Subscribe to our RSS Feed

If you’re running XP Professional, it’s easy to control which Start menu customizations a user can carry out via Group Policy settings. On XP Home systems, however, you’ll need to edit the Registry directly. Use the list below to selectively enable or disable these features for individual users. Adding and setting a value to 1 enables the feature, while 0 disables it. All changes should be made to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer key (unless otherwise noted).

Policy: Disable the new simple Start Menu
Registry Value: NoSimpleStartMenu

Policy: Remove pinned programs list from the Start menu
Registry Value: NoStartMenuPinnedList

Policy:Remove frequent programs list from the Start Menu
Registry Value: NoStartMenuMFUprogramsList

Policy:Disable and remove links to Windows Update
Registry Value: NoWindowsUpdate

Policy:Remove user folders from the Start Menu (My Documents, My Music, etc)
Registry Values:NoStartMenuMyMusic , NoSMMyPictures , NoFavoritesMenu , NoRecentDocsMenu

Policy:Prohibit user from changing user folder paths
Registry Value: DisableMyPicturesDirChange , DisableMyMusicDirChange , DisableFavoritesDirChange.

Policy:Remove My Documents folder from the Start Menu
Registry Value: NoSMMyDocs

Policy:Remove Recent Documents item from Start Menu
Registry Value: NoRecentDocsMenu

Policy:Clear history of recent documents on exit
Registry Value: ClearRecentDocsOnExit

Policy:Remove Favorites item from Start Menu
Registry Value: NoFavoritesMenu

Policy:Remove My Computer from the Start Menu
Registry Value: {20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
Location: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NonEnum.

Policy:Remove Network Connections from the Start Menu
Registry Value: NoNetworkConnections

Policy:Remove Network Places from the Start Menu
Registry Value: NoStartMenuNetworkPlaces

Policy:Do not add shares of recently used documents to Network Places
Registry Value: NoRecentDocsNetHood

Policy:Remove Help item from Start Menu
Registry Value: NoSMHelp

Policy:Remove Search item from Start Menu
Registry Value: NoFind

Policy:Remove Run item from Start Menu
Registry Value: NoRun

Policy:Disable drag-and-drop menus on the Start Menu
Registry Value: NoChangeStartMenu

Written by Dan DiNicolo - Visit Website

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