Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If your Jump Lists have become a little messy and you want a clean slate, this guide will show you how to clear the it for an individual program. This is useful if you want to start from scratch or purge history so, for example, people don’t know you like lolcat pictures…

Note: With some programs, you can right click the entries you want to hide/remove and click Remove; however, with some programs, like Windows Explorer, the list will keep populating with other “helpful” suggestions.

Clear a Taskbar Jump List

Taskbar Jump Lists are stored here:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

As you can see, the files in this directory aren’t named in a way that makes sense to us:

Before you go and delete all the lists (which you’re welcome to do–at your own peril), you can identify which list goes with which application:

Order the files by Date modified, with the newest modified files at the top:

Now modify the Jump List you want to clear by pinning an item:

Go back to the folder, look for the newest modified file, and delete it:

Before:

After:

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