Quick Tip: Pin to the Start Menu or NOT…

Here’s a quick tip I learned by sitting next to Jacques Bensimon today.  If you want to control whether an application is ‘allowed’ to be pinned to the Start Menu or Taskbar, head into the registry and navigate over to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileAssociation
and check out the AddRemoveNames key.  If an application has one of the words in this key, you will not be able to pin it.  I ran a quick test using Revo Uninstaller (<-Great app BTW).  The word install is listed in AddRemoveNames so I wasn’t presented any Pin options.

You can see that there is no option for pinning on the right click menu.

Remove the word install from the key string, restart Explorer, and you’ve enabled the ability to Pin for that application.

Nice and easy way to restrict or enable a user’s ability to pin things in a Citrix XenApp or VDI image.