About two weeks ago, I went hunting and found out how to disable XP MCE's rather unfortunate habit of adding every possible network place connected to my computer via a registry edit.
One of the other things this did was to stop the update of the most-recently used programs on the start menu, which I only sort of wondered about at the time. I would like to change it back to the way it was before, added network places and all but I can't remember the change I made to the registry. Does this ring any bells with anybody? I fear that I'm not explaining it clearly.