<p>The Recent Projects panel on the Start Page of VS2008 Professional doesn't appear to work, and constantly remains empty.</p>

<p>I've noticed this on 3 of our developers VS2008 installations, in fact all the installations that weren't updated from 2005 but installed from scratch. I generally treat this as a bit of a curiosity, but now I have a new laptop and fresh install of VS2008, it's also happening to me, and I've upgraded the phenomena from a curio to an annoyance.</p>

<p>Anyone know if this is a bug or if there is a setting I'm missing somewhere.</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

<p><strong>EDIT</strong> Thanks, but Tools | Options | Environment | General | "items shown in recently used lists" was and is set to 6 by default</p>

[{'answer_id': 58357, 'author': 'John Sheehan', 'author_id': 1786, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1786', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Is Tools | Options | Environment | General | "items shown in recently used lists" set to a number greater than 0?</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 112879, 'author': 'johnc', 'author_id': 5302, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5302', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>Finally worked it out!</p>\n\n<p>The recent projects is driven by (or at least shares a 'Show' flag with) the Recent Documents in the Start Menu.</p>\n\n<p>For some reason our SOE has this hidden.</p>\n\n<p>Both the following need th be set to 0: </p>\n\n<p>HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\Explorer\\NoRecentDocsHistory HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Policies\\Explorer\\NoRecentDocsMenu </p>\n"}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/58353', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5302/']