How Can I Control The Size Of My Start Menu?

The Start Menu is an interesting beast. It seems to grow forever sometimes as you install new software. There are even situations where it can grow to be bigger than your screen, which can make it difficult to get to all the items on it.

Fully wrangling the Start Menu is fairly straightforward, but requires just a teensy bit of obscure knowledge, and an awareness of a couple of pitfalls.

Oh, and administrative privileges.

That obscure knowledge is actually at the root of the specific question. The Start Menu is created, on-the-fly, from a Start Menu that is specific to the account you’re logged in as, merged with a Start Menu defined for “All Users”. When you right click on the Start button and select Open, you’re only looking at the settings for your login account. If you want to see the rest of your start menu, you’ll need to click on Open All Users instead.

It might be more instructive to click on Explore All Users. This way you’ll not only see the contents of the folder, but on the left you’ll see the directory tree that will show you where everything is, in relationship to everything else.

For example, here’s Windows Explorer after I right-clicked on Start, and then clicked on Explore All Users:

Windows Explorer opens up on the following directory:

c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu

That’s the directory that is the “All Users” component of the Start Menu. You can see the “Programs” subdirectory, which corresponds to the “Programs” or “All Programs” item on the Start Menu.

Any folders you create underneath this “Start Menu” directory will appear as new branches within your actual Start Menu. Any shortcuts you create will appear as menu selections within whatever branch corresponds to the subdirectory you create it in.

And since this is the “All Users” branch, then anything you create or change here will affect anyone who logs into this machine on any user account.

If you look closely at the bottom of that image, you’ll see there’s another directory at the same level as “All Users” called “LeoN” – that’s the directory that corresponds to my login account. If we click on it, we see something like this:

You can see that there’s a bunch more stuff within that directory, but that there’s also a Start Menu item. Any changes you make within a user-specific Start Menu folder take effect only for that login account.

In my case, you’ll see, I have a couple of non-standard sub-folders: “xfer” and “books”.

Here’s what my start menu looks like:

(I use “Classic” start menu style, but the principals apply to both classic and new.)

So when click on Start to open that menu, here’s what happens:

• The items, both subfolders and shortcuts from the “All Users” start menu (from c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu) are collected.
• The items, from my “LeoN” start menu (from c:\Documents and Settings\LeoN\Start Menu) are merged in.
• The resulting combination is display as the menu. “Books” and “Xfer” appear as the result of the settings in my user account’s Start Menu, and “Programs” shows up because it’s included in both “All Users” and “LeoN”.

(At the topmost level, items such as “Documents”, “Settings” and so on are not handled this way. They’re controlled by other features and settings elsewhere.)

Now, knowing all this, you can manipulate and re-arrange your Start Menu almost to your hearts content by creating or moving the subdirectories and shortcuts within these two folder trees. For example if your start menu is too large, you can simply create a subfolder within it, and then move some of the items into that subfolder. That subfolder and its contents will appear as an additional level within the start menu tree.

The choice of whether to put things in “All Users” or in a specific login account depends on how you use your computer. If, like me, your computers are pretty much single user, then it doesn’t matter much which you choose. (As a side note, this is also one of the same choices made when installing a program and it asks if you want it installed for “All Users”, or just the current user.)

A couple of caveats:

• You must have administrative privileges to modify the “All Users” items.
• Some programs will not uninstall their start menu items properly if you move them within the Start Menu after the program has been installed. In cases like this you may have to remove those items manually.

There are, naturally, other tricks one can play with the start menu, but this first principal of how it’s create is both fundamental, and quite powerful.