To completely prevent Office 2000 programs from creating recent document links, use the Microsoft NUL device as the target. Requires editing the registry. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUL: for a simple explanation of the nul device)

Office creates the recent doc links in the "C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent" directory.

To prevent this behavior change the destination directory to NUL in the registry. Then the "Recent" folder and all its recent document links can be deleted and will not be recreated.

Navigate to the above key using a registry editor, and change the data in the RecentFiles value to NUL (in my install the original value was "recent")




----- OR -------


save the following 3 lines to a file (copy and paste into a text file), right click on the saved file, and select "merge" to install:

Notes:

• Has only been tested with an Office 2000 install. MAY also work with Office 2003 (change the 9.0 to 11.0 in above registry references)
• If the RecentFiles value is made empty (not changed to NUL), Offfice dumps recent documents links in the office directory
• If the RecentFiles value is deleted, Office re-creates and uses the default "recent" directory again