Yes, you could waste hours on the various permutations. I did discover that when you have no Excludes at all and Recent Documents ticked the My Recent Documents folder is deleted in its entirety and recreated. I wonder if this has something to do with the problem of selective excludes? Compounded of course by the possible assumption that nobody would want to do a selective deletion on recent docs?
Yes, I suppose that's the price we pay to have our computer files cleaned up - sometimes you just can't help throwing the baby out with the bath water - but at least mom, dad, and the older kids are clean.
I'd like to be able to preserve the MRU files in MS Office applications as well as not touch Recent at all - *sigh* maybe in some future upgrade.
For what it's worth Jim, I've been trying to exclude files in that folder since yesterday with no success.
Trying a different tack, I even ended up with the folder renamed to "recent", but still with no success. The folder itself, as mentioned by Augeas, was deleted and then recreated by Windows, and eventually with its original name and icon.
OK, everyone - 'nough. Beating a dead horse now. I'm going to change my watch cycle so I no longer get notified every day. Looks like the only hope is that the next upgrade will solve the problem. I'll either have to live with it as is, or stop running the program on startup and just run it when I'm not going to need the MRU files and Recent links.
There's a different reason why MS Word doesn't remember the recently opened documents. CC automatically detects that a number of applications are installed and then those applications (e.g. MS Office) show up in the ""Application"" pane in the main screen. Ticking a box there makes CC clean a number of folders and/or sections of the registry related to MS Word/MS Office only. And that's the reason why MS Word's ""Recent Documents"" is wiped as well.
I know the same happens with Real Player SP. When Real Player opens e.g. a *.mp3 file, it stores a shortcut in a special Real Player folder but a shortcut is placed in the general ""recent"" folder as well.
With some digging in the registry I found out how the CC option ""Recent documents"" works.
Windows XP (Home SP 3) maintains and updates a number of lists in the registry:
1. All recently (i.e. the last 100 (???)) opened files.
2. An extra set of lists which contain recently opened files sorted by extension. For every extension (e.g. *.jpg, *.bmp, *.mp3) and for every recently opened folder as well, there's a separate list containing max. 8 (???) entries, each.
When the user has selected ""Recent Documents"" then those two lists in the registry are completely removed from the registry. But for me it's not quite clear how that affects the ""memory"" of program and/or Windows.
I would suggest you un-tick ""Recent documents"" but use ""Include"" and/or ""Exclude"" instead in combination with ticking the ""MS Office"" box in the ""Application"" pane. It's my experience that this combination works well.