Visual Studio 2010, “File > Recent Projects and Solutions” is not a active !

Question

I have created hundreds of project on VS 2010 but "File > Recent Projects and Solutions" section is not there ! normally, it should have been like this

but mine is like below;

as you can see, also on the start page, there is only two project on the 'Recent Projects' section which is odd given the circumstances.

what should I do here to get it worked?

Thanks in advance for your help.

EDIT

here is how customize window looks;

and here is the regedit view;

Answer 1

It seems you have two separate problems:

1. The "Recent Files" and "Recent Projects and Solutions" options are missing from your File Menu.

2. You have a lot less Projects in your Recent Projects than you should.

Solution To #1: Go to Tools > Customize > Commands. From there you should be able to select "File | Recent Files" and "File | Recent Projects and Solutions". Next, you click "Reset All". Hopefully, you have those two lists back now.

Solution To #2: This one is a little bit more complicated because it could be a number of things.

1. First, I would make sure you have the number you want for the "Recent files" options in Tools > Options > Environment > General.

2. If you already had that, check the registry location and make sure you actually have entries here since this is where VS pulls it from. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ProjectMRUList . The 10.0 is for VS 2010. More info here. If there's nothing there then your recent projects aren't being saved properly.

3. You could try calling Devenv /ResetSettings to reset the VS settings. More info at MSDN.

4. Finally it could be due to a Windows Explorer setting which hides recent files. This is a possibility because VS takes its directions from the same place with regards to recent files. You would need to make sure HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer "NoRecentDocsHistory" is zero. More info on this possible solution as well as other ideas to this problem can be found here.

Answer 2

This worked for me.

open notepad and paste the text below in it without the ===== part.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

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

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ProjectMRUList]

=================================================================================== now save it as vs2010-fix.reg or whatever you like just make sure it ends with .reg