Remove Media Center Start Menu Strips Via Simple Registry Settings

extras_icon After posting this rather difficult method to removing start menu strips from Windows 7 Media Center, a reader posted an alternate method that turns out to be much simpler. As long as you don’t need to remove the Movie strip this hack can be a much easier solution. Currently, however, there is no publicly known key to remove the Movie strip from Windows 7 Media Center.

This method also enables “per user” disabling of menu strips through the current user’s registry values. Alternatively, editing the local machine values will set the default visibility of strips for all users. This hack was originally posted to Mikinhosoft with details on the registry values to edit. For simplicity we’ll just edit a .reg file to add the values to the registry.

First download this registry file with the all the entries for each of the start menu strips (excluding Movies). Next open the file in notepad to edit the values of each entry. Inside you will find an entry for each menu strip, excluding Movies, which has an “OnStartMenu” value. By default each menu strip’s “OnStartMenu” value is set to true.

remove_stripts_reg

For each entry you will see an “@” value with the name of each strip, which is only used to identify the strip, changing this doesn’t change anything inside Media Center. Change the “OnStartMenu” value to “False” for any strip you don’t want to appear in your media center start menu. To reverse the change simply change the value back to “True”.

If you’d rather set the default strips for all users change each “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”. Changing all of these values to local machine will set the default start menu strips across all user accounts.

After you’ve completed editing the .reg file save and then double-click to add the values into your registry. When prompted, allow the registry entries to be updated. This proves to be a much easier method to edit your start menu strips in Media Center. Again, thanks to Mikinhosoft for posting this information and creating the registry file for this hack.

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