Unfortunately, as is often the case, convenience and ease of use isn’t without its drawbacks. It’s not hard to see the inherent privacy concerns that the Recent Documents unearths. It’s obviously not a good thing if your significant other sees the plans for the surprise birthday party because you were organizing the plan the night before in Microsoft Word.
There are a couple of solutions in varying degrees of convenience. First, you can simply disable the feature all together from the Start Menu Properties dialog. While drastic, it does solve the problem abruptly!
Secondly, you can manually purge the Recent Items history when it may contain something you wish to keep secret – providing you remember to do so!
Lastly, automating the second solution seems quite logical; which is what Automatically Clear Recent Documents History does. The free application (the installer did attempt to install Real Player but the installer provides a clear means to deny the installation) resides neatly in the System Tray. Configuration is straightforward – just choose the desired auto-clear interval from the presets provided and Activate the process.
The application will change to a traditional countdown or progress bar dialog which relays the time until the next automatic clearing of the history.
Items can be manually purged with Clear Now or the whole process can be disabled with Deactivate.
