Windows 7 gets a (sort of) 70 program limit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, Microsoft, Uncategorized on
I found an interesting Windows 7 bug today.
The other day I took my workhorse Windows Vista desktop machine over to Windows 7. It was a move that was somewhat overdue - but one that would finally put my desktop on the same level as my regular HP tablet. My usual way of working is to drive Vista and 7 through the search box - so it took me a couple of days to realise that the All Programs section of the Start Menu was blank.
All the shortcuts were there, just nothing showing.
Odd, I thought.
Annoying, I thought.
Ooops, I thought.
Search was still working, but I was trying to remember the name of a program for a friend who needed an unarchiver for a Windows PC he was setting up - and of course search doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re looking for…
Hmmm.
Google showed that I wasn’t the first person affected by the problem, but most of the solutions people were suggesting (a) didn’t work and (b) could have left me reinstalling Windows again. It’s never a good idea to wholesale copy the registry from one PC to another.
Finally I found this blog post.
It turns out that there’s a bug in Windows 7 upgrade installs, where it limits the number of items in the All Users program menu to 70. While you can transfer items to a hierarchical directory structure (which will then let you see all your items as you open folders in the start menu), you could also do what I did - clear out the cruft of an untold number of installs of the odd downloaded utility or 30.
The result of the uninstallfest?
I can see all my applications again - and I’ve got a cleaner, less crufty PC.
It’s a fairly innocuous bug as bugs go, but it’s still annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 - but as we in the EU (unless we’re signed up to SA) won’t be able to do upgrade installs, we won’t know…
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