How in the Tech

Uncovering all the launched applications by count and date in Windows

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 14, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Privacy, Windows

Were you aware that Windows maintains a list of all the programs that have been executed on the system? Perhaps you read between the lines and realized it was doing some sort of metrics tracking in order to populate the Start Menu and it’s section of most-used applications. However, Windows takes that a step forward and literally records every single application launch!

The statistics are maintained in the Windows Registry under the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\UserAssist. However, if you traverse to this location with Registry Editor you will quickly find the results aren’t quite what you expected. The data is wrapped in a simple layer of encryption – which might be sufficient to keep the less savvy privacy invaders at bay; that is until you realize there exists many utilities that can uncover the truth.

UserAssistView is another free application from NirSoft that painlessly decrypts the registry information and displays the results in a readable table view display. UserAssistView lists the program in question, the number of times it’s been executed, and the last execution time – all in sortable columns. The software allows for you to quickly delete any and all entries but, from what I’ve been able to determine, there is no way to ultimately disable this behavior in Windows. Therefor, this is a process that needs to be repeated if you are truly concerned about prying eyes.

Download UserAssistView