Solved Unable to Remove Old Entries from Run Dialog Dropdown

[petravol]

Hi, Forum.

I am having a problem where some documents that used to be on a drive appear in my Run menu dropdown/autocomplete in Windows 8.1 even though I never I never accessed them from the Run menu and the drive in question is no longer even mounted. I searched far and wide and tried many things, but none helped:

1. Clearing the two "Store x..." checkboxes in "Jump Lists" in the Taskbar and Navigation properties pane has no effect. It does clear my primary history, but the offending entries remain.
2. RunMRU in the registry (generally offered as a tip for clearing/editing the history) does not contain these entries. Removing the whole RunMRU subtree acts more or less the same as #1.
3. Oddly, when I type "X" or "X:" in the run box, it makes all the (bad) suggestions, but if I change it to "X:\" (or enter any more of the relevant path, e.g., "X:\document.txt") they no longer show up even though they theoretically match.
4. I have searched the registry pretty thoroughly, including using third-party tools to search binary data. I found one or two hits, but not all of the relevant data, in ".../ComDLg32/OpenSavePidMRU" and a "RecentDocs" area, but removing them had no effect. Note that some of these hits were plain text and others were binary with null values in between every letter.
5. I've done searches of all the files under C:\WINDOWS, with no hits.
6. I have confirmed that the offending drive/directories are not set to index using the Windows Indexing Service, even when the drive is mounted. I have also reset the Windows Index, and they still appear when the index is empty.
7. One of these directories appeared under "recent places" in Explorer. Removing it had no effect.
8. Remounting and than unmounting the original drive has no effect, even though some of the files that appear in the Run dropdown no longer exist.

Any other ideas/suggestions? Any help would be appreciated.

petravol

 

[adamf]

Perhaps this will help? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/142298

 

[Brink]

Hello Petravol, and welcome to Eight Forums.

In addition, this can help to clear the auto suggest history for your Run dialog.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/12837-run-auto-suggest-history-delete-windows.html

 

[petravol]

adamf and Brink,

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, I tried clearing RunMRU (and the related MRU keys) and rebooting, which did clear some entries from the Run box, but not the ones from the unmounted drive (mostly referenced in #2 above). It's very strange.

petravol

 

[Brink]

As a test, turn off and on your recent items and places to clear them to see if that may also clear this.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/9597-recent-items-frequent-places-turn-off-windows-8-a.html

 

[adamf]

Hmm - if you cleared it there (Brinks .bat file cleans the same) then you must be finding info from elsewhere.

I just deleted the whole RunMRU key as a test. It looks like this now - is this what you are after?

 

[petravol]

Brink: I tried that, too (see #1--I realize that list isn't really coherent), but I just tried it again to be sure (both using the GUI and the batch file), with the same results. Most of the entries from the run menu are cleared, but the ones for the disconnected drives (there are actually at least two) remain.

adamf: That's roughly what I'm after, I agree that it must be coming from somewhere else, but so far haven't been able to find it. My run box looks blank like that after clearing, but as soon as I type the letter of one of the drives with problematic entries, the entire list of entries appears. So if I type X, the list fills with X:\file1, X:\file2, X:\directory1\file3, etc.

Thanks again.

petra

 

[petravol]

I recently searched all files on my hard drive (the actual data) for the name of the mysteriously appearing files, with no hits. I'm at a complete loss. Any ideas or leads would still be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[petravol]

Found it! It was in the Internet Explorer history. I had thought I had turned off searching of browser history, if that option exists, and I'm surprised anything ever opened in Internet Explorer, since I usually install Chrome right away, but clearing the browser history fixed the problem. Marking as solved, and thanks for your help!

 

[Brink]

Great news. Thank you for posting back with your findings.