If you work with a lot of samples, the chances are quite likely that you will end up in a rather dirty list of Recent Projects List in Visual Studio. I'm personally quite nit-picky and I really hate it when I find something like this...

Now... I don't know which of these Samples should I click on (since I have two in the list!). Anyway, there are multiple reasons why you would like to remove the junk entries from this list. One way is to open the Registry and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList. This list contains all the values you are looking for. Delete the values which you don't like and restart Visual Studio.

Another way, which I think is a smarter one is to download this ZIP and do the following...

1. Extract it anywhere in your machine.
2. Open Visual Studio, click on Tools -> External Tools...
3. Click on Add button and in the Title field, write "Clear Recently Used List"
4. In the Command Line, browse to the <SAVED__PATH>\ClearRecentItems.exe and click on OK.


4. Now, you should have this tool listed on your Tools Menu in VS 2008.

5. Here is the sample output...

Feel free to download this small utility...

Hope this helps,
Rahul