Windows 7 - some MRUs have disappeared

Pawnless Endgame · 7 Apr 2011 at 22:40

The taskbar MRUs and pinned items is one of the biggest enhancements in Windows 7 in my opinion. It still works for most of my taskbar icons (see pic 2 below):

But for Notepad and Explorer, their pinned/MRU lists have disappeared (see pic 1 below):

I'm a bit lost without it as I now have to navigate the full paths to access .txt files. I tried keywoards in Google like mru, pinned, taskbar, disappeared but was getting too wide a range of problems/answers. Does anyone have any ideas?

They used to work then popped their clogs about a week ago. I recently installed Bejeweled 3 and the Firefox 4.0 RC but I can't think they have caused any registry hiccups etc?

Thanks!

SiriusB · 7 Apr 2011 at 23:00

They're usually referred to as Jump Lists, so you may have better luck searching for that than MRU.

A thread I found here has various solutions you could try to fix the issue.

Pawnless Endgame · 7 Apr 2011 at 23:32

Hi Sirius. I have fixed it, and I'll explain what I did :-)

I seldom use Ccleaner, certainly not any time recently. I followed the instructions from Benji.net, about halfway down your link, which was to delete the contents of %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations. Because this erases all of the lists, I deleted them one by one, ensuring that my working lists were still working and trying random .txt files and random Explorer locations until they started populating. This worked a treat and I didn't have to reboot between my iterations.

Thanks about the new terminology too. I remembered 'MRU' from my old tech support days and I didn't realise they were called jump lists now. So I was searching the wrong words!

SiriusB · 7 Apr 2011 at 23:35

Glad you found an answer! And yes, always handy knowing what the thing that is broken is called!