Background

After every restart, the icons in my Quick Launch toolbar in Windows Vista were rearranged into alphabetical order. The toolbar itself was resized, taking up most of the Taskbar. It didn’t matter how many times I carefully moved the icons around, nor did it matter if I logged off and back on, restarted, or shut down and powered back up—I couldn’t get the icons to stay the way I want them. I don’t remember when it started, so I can’t pinpoint what changed on my system that might have caused it.

After much searching, I found various solutions to a similar problem in Windows XP. Several solutions suggested installing third-party utilities that reset your Desktop back to the way you like after each restart. I’m generally not a big fan of adding on utilities to fix problems with the operating system; I prefer to fix the OS. I finally found one solution that worked for me with Vista that fixed a problem deep inside the Windows Registry.

Read on for the details on how I fixed this annoying quirk.

In this article

Warning: If you are not familiar with the Windows Registry, it’s where the majority of your computer’s configuration and settings are stored. Always backup your system before tweaking your Registry to help avoid data loss. The solution below worked for me, but your situation could be different. You assume all risk and agree to hold my company and me harmless from any damages, direct or indirect, including lost data, time, and profits.

You may find it useful to print this article and work from the printout since you will need to logoff or restart your computer to complete this process. At the very least, you should bookmark this page (or “add it to your Favorites” depending on which browser you use) so you can find it again if you need it later.

Manually updating the Registry

Here is the way to update your Registry manually (which I prefer since I can verify that everything matches what is expected):

1. Go to the Start menu, select “Run…”, and type “regedit” where it asks for the program you wish to open. Note: You must have administrative rights to run RegEdit.
2. After RegEdit has opened, navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER → Software → Microsoft → Windows → CurrentVersion → Policies → Explorer
3. Look for an entry named “NoSaveSettings” of type “REG_DWORD” with a value of “0×00000000 (0)” or “0×00000001 (1)”.
   1. If the value is “0×00000000 (0)”, then the setting is correct, and you are facing a different challenge. Close RegEdit and look for a different solution. Sorry.
   2. If the value is “0×00000001 (1)”, then double-click the icon for “NoSaveSettings” and change the value data from “1″ to “0″ (whether it’s hex or decimal doesn’t matter) and click OK. Close RegEdit. Skip to step #5.
   3. If the value is any other number, you can try changing the value to “0″, but I’m not sure what will happen. The value should only be a 0 or a 1. You should either write down the value for future reference (if things go wrong), or right-click the “Explorer” key, and “Export” the key to a file that you can use to put things back the way they were before you made changes.
4. It’s very likely that you do not have an entry named “NoSaveSettings” (I didn’t.) In that case, you will need to add one.
   1. After clicking on “Explorer” in the left pane of RegEdit, go to the “Edit” menu (or right-click in an open space in the right pane) and select “New” and then “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
   2. A new entry named “New Value #1″ should appear in the right pane. Rename it to “NoSaveSettings” (note that there are no spaces in that name!).
   3. Double-click the icon for “NoSaveSettings” and change the value data from “1″ to “0″ (whether it’s hex or decimal doesn’t matter) and click OK.
   4. Close RegEdit. You’re almost done.
5. Go ahead and reorganize and resize your Quick Launch toolbar the way you want it. This will hopefully be the last time you have to do this.
6. Now either restart (that’s what I did) or logoff and logon. Your Quick Launch toolbar should be the way you left it.
7. If it’s not right, repeat step #5 and #6. If it still isn’t right, you are facing a different challenge. Look for a different solution. Sorry. If you find another solution that does work, feel free to leave the information or a link to the information in a comment below to help other people find it. Thanks!

Semi-automatically updating the Registry

If you do not like using RegEdit, you can create a registry patch file that accomplishes the same thing. This is, in fact, and export from my own Registry. All you need to do is open Notepad, copy the following text from this web page, paste it into a new Notepad document, and save the file on your Desktop as "NoSaveSettings.reg". The quote marks ARE important (otherwise Notepad tries to save the file as a text document), but the file name and location are not (these are just convenient examples). Double-click the file. It should warn you of the dangers of adding information to your Registry from unsavory sources. Click Yes (if you think this will work for you). Then proceed from Step #5 above.

—- Start copying below this line —-
[code lang="ini"]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoSaveSettings"=dword:00000000

[/code]
—- End copying above this line —-

Other resources

For a few other ideas, you can read the article at Annoyances.org that led me to this solution.

The new Microsoft motto seems to be “make everything useful at least one extra step more difficult”. This certainly has been true for all but the most commonly used features with Office 2007’s Ribbon interface. It’s also true with many of the control panels in Windows Vista.

One control panel I use regularly is “Network Connections”.

Using Vista’s GUI interface in non-Classic mode, you have to go to Start > Control Panel > View network status and tasks > Manage network connections.

In Classic View, go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Manage network connections.

You can also use the Search box (or the Run option if you have unhidden it) and enter ncpa.cpl.

I’m not sure which is the less appealing route—all that clicking or trying to remember a cryptic filename.

What I did to make life a little bit easier was use the search method, and when the control panel appeared at the top of the search results pane, I right-clicked it, chose “Send To”, then “Desktop (create a shortcut)”. A shortcut appeared on my Desktop, which I cut so I could paste it somewhere easier to find (like at the top of my Start menu). Depending on where you save it, Vista might require administrative rights to paste the shortcut.

Special thanks to Andre De Costa’s Teching It Easy blog for this useful information.

I do not know why the developers at Microsoft felt the need to move already somewhat obscure and hidden features to even more obscure locations in Windows Vista. Maybe they figure that it’s helpful to techs to slow them down to stretch out their billable hours or build-in even more job security for system admins by making things more and more difficult for average users.

Under the Windows 9x family, to add programs or folders to the “Send To” context menu, you just plunked a shortcut into “C:\WINDOWS\Send To“.

This was far too easy, and the average user had no problem customizing Windows the way they wanted. When Windows 2000 (followed by XP and 2003) came along and moved user preferences to the “C:\Documents and Settings” folder, I thought that was a good idea. After all, the Windows folder gets very full, and the average user could cause him or herself problems by deleting the wrong thing. Thus, the Send To folder was moved to “C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Send To“. This was still pretty easy and intuitive for anyone who actually wanted to use this handy feature.

Along comes Windows Vista. The familiar “Documents and Settings” folder structure has been replaced by a shortcut (with more shortcuts from there). Security has been tightened to the point that a user with standard user permissions probably can’t even make changes to his or her own settings without a lots of frustration (I haven’t tried, because standard user permissions are SO limited as to make Vista barely usable for anyone who has even moderate experience with Windows.).

So how does one edit the Send To menu? It should be obvious (but only if you work for Microsoft). You go to the new Search box in the Start menu, type in “shell:sendto” (without quotes) and press your ENTER key. In a moment, the Send To folder will appear, and you can edit pretty much as normal (though depending on what you try to put in there, Windows may throw up some annoying permission questions).

That is just so golly-darned intuitive, I smacked my forehead wondering how I could have been so stupid as to not come with “shell:sendto” on my own. Yeah right.

Maybe it is me, or maybe other people don’t use the Send To feature very much, because there were hardly any search engine hits for this beloved feature (of course, I did use Windows Live search, and it rarely compares to Google for finding useful information), and absolutely no results on Microsoft’s Website or knowledge base.

Thank goodness for Andre’s blog (which includes pictures) for cluing me in on this great feature.