How to Remove An Item from RUN Dialog Box History / MRU List?

All of us use Start menu RUN dialog box to enter frequent commands in Windows. It stores the entered commands in its history and suggests them whenever we enter them next time.

Although its a good feature but sometimes we might want to remove a particular item from the history list because of some obvious reasons.

Here is a simple and safe method to remove any desired item from RUN history / MRU (Most Recently Used) list:

1. Type regedit in RUN dialog box and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU

In right-side pane, you'll see various String values with the name a, b, c, etc and their value will be set to the command which you entered in RUN dialog box:

3. You just need to delete the String value which contains the command which you want to remove from RUN history list. e.g. if you want to remove "msconfig" command from RUN history, then delete the "b" String value.

4. That's it. Now the deleted command will no longer appear in RUN MRU list.

This article was posted in Troubleshooting, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP.

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8 Comments

Osku Kaskisola

And if i remember right, you can do this on CCleaner ?
VG

^^ Yep.
Ravi

Hi vishal,
can we increase the number of commands in history of run dialog box from 26 to any number that we want???
Ravi

because there are only 26 alphabets in english.
VG

^^ Yep. Its not possible.
Saurabh Gupta

Hi vg,
How can we use RUN dialog box to open any s/w installed on d PC (except giving d path)???
Deyaa Addeen Fahmy Shedeed

thank you very much.
kn

Hi vg,

Followed the Registry Editor sequence to MRU. Only the default item is listed. Does it make a difference if I am using Mozilla Firefox?