Recent Projects panel on VS2008 not working for fresh installs

Question

The Recent Projects panel on the Start Page of VS2008 Professional doesn't appear to work, and constantly remains empty.

I've noticed this on 3 of our developers VS2008 installations, in fact all the installations that weren't updated from 2005 but installed from scratch. I generally treat this as a bit of a curiosity, but now I have a new laptop and fresh install of VS2008, it's also happening to me, and I've upgraded the phenomena from a curio to an annoyance.

Anyone know if this is a bug or if there is a setting I'm missing somewhere.

Thanks

EDIT Thanks, but Tools | Options | Environment | General | "items shown in recently used lists" was and is set to 6 by default

Answer 1

Is Tools | Options | Environment | General | "items shown in recently used lists" set to a number greater than 0?

Answer 2

Finally worked it out!

The recent projects is driven by (or at least shares a 'Show' flag with) the Recent Documents in the Start Menu.

For some reason our SOE has this hidden.

Both the following need th be set to 0:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsHistory HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsMenu

Answer 3

Thanks a lot