In the Vista Start Menu, the Recent Items menu shows the last 10 documents you have looked at. If you want to show more or less than this, you can set this to be whatever number you like. To change this number, you need to edit your registry by running regedit (go to the Start menu and search for regedit.exe to run it).


When the regedit window opens, you'll see a bunch of expandable keys on the left side of the screen. Open up the keys in the following path, HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Policies -> Explorer. Once you get there, click in the right side of the window and select "New -> DWORD (32-bit)" and call it MaxRecentDocs. Once it is created, double click on it to set the value. Whatever number you enter here will then be the number of Recent Items that are shown in the Start Menu.