Change the number of recent items shown on Windows 7 and vista start menu

If you use a program regularly, that it is placed somewhere deep on the start menu. Than you can place it easily in the start menu by dragging it there.
When you are using the Classic Menu than some of the steps will not apply due to the different settings.

How to restore start menu to its original place in the desktop?

Open the properties of taskbar from the control menu. Then click customize.
After that click the option of default settings and click OK to execute the function
If you’ve ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you’ve found the right article. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak.
What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu (I changed mine down to 1 for illustration)

Manual Registry Tweak

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box, and then navigate down to the following key, creating it if it doesn’t exist.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPolicies Explorer

Add a new DWORD 32-bit value named MaxRecentDocs into the right-hand pane, and then double-click to open it up.

To set the value, you’ll first need to change Base to Decimal, and then you can enter any value you want. For instance, if you want to set it to 50, enter that into the Value data field.

Now I’m not entirely sure what will happen if you set it to a huge number… I’d stick with something like 20.

Note that the same tweak works in Windows 7 as well, even though the screenshots are from Vista.