How to 'Refresh' the Vista start menu programmatically.

Question

Hi,

I am working on a piece of code that removes an extra folder we have in the user's start menu. I start by removing all of the shortcuts it contains, and then remove the folder itself.

After this is done, I can confirm that the shortcuts have been removed from the start menu, but their containing folder remains listed in the start menu. So, I checked the file system for such a folder and found none. Suspecting that this is some sort of refresh problem, I logged my user out and back into Vista and found that the folder was now removed from the start menu list.

How utterly annoying... Does anyone know how to programmatically force a 'refresh' of the Vista start menu, so that the user doesn't see this empty folder before they log out?

Thanks, -Ben

Answer 1

This article seems to have the answer you're looking for:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winforms/thread/ce540c7d-a113-4f39-956e-0af6bc91abd3/

The answer given is:

class Program
 {
  [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
  private static extern IntPtr SendMessageTimeout ( IntPtr hWnd, int Msg, IntPtr wParam, string lParam, uint fuFlags, uint uTimeout, IntPtr lpdwResult );

  private static readonly IntPtr HWND_BROADCAST = new IntPtr(0xffff);
  private const int WM_SETTINGCHANGE = 0x1a;
  private const int SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG = 0x0002;

  static void Main ( string[] args )
  {
   SendMessageTimeout(HWND_BROADCAST, WM_SETTINGCHANGE, IntPtr.Zero, null, SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG, 100, IntPtr.Zero);
  }
 }

Answer 2

I tried to implement this myself but it did not work as expected using SendMessageTimeout.

Instead, it worked when I used SHGetSpecialFolderLocation(CSIDL_STARTMENU) SHChangeNotify(SHCNE_UPDATEDIR, SHCNF_IDLIST, pidl, NULL);

See this article for sample c++ code: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q193293/

Tested on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (x86) with SP1.