The Open and Save common dialog boxes display a bar along the left-hand side with quick links to default locations like:

• History
• My Documents
• Desktop
• Favorites
• My Network Places

You can hide this bar by executing the following steps:

1. Start a registry editor (e.g. regedit.exe).

2. Navigate to the subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32
   If this subkey doesn’t exist, create it and add the following valuename to it:
    

   Hive:	HKEY_CURRENT_USER
   Key:	Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32
   Name:	NoPlacesBar
   Type:	REG_DWORD
   Value:	1 enable (ie. this enables the NoPlacesBar, thus nothing is displayed!)

To enable the Places bar again, either delete the NoPlacesBar registry value or set it to 0 (zero).
This change will not affect applications within the Microsoft Office suite but will affect applications, such as Notepad and Microsoft Paint, Internet Explorer, in short all applications that use the Open and Save common dialog boxes.

You can modify the five default quick links in the Open and Save common dialog boxes by executing the following steps:

1. Start a registry editor (e.g. regedit.exe).

2. Navigate to the subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32
   If this subkey doesn’t exist, create it first and then add the following key to it:
    

   Hive:	HKEY_CURRENT_USER
   Key:	Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32
   Key:	PlacesBar

   Then add the following valuenames to this new key:
    

   Hive:	HKEY_CURRENT_USER
   Key:	Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar
   Name:	Place0
   Name:	Place1
   Name:	Place2
   Name:	Place3
   Name:	Place4
   Type:	REG_SZ (String value) or REG_DWORD see note
   Value:	1 enable

   Note:
   Make each entry either a string value (REG_SZ) entry (for a named folder) or a DWORD value (REG_DWORD) entry (for a special folder, such as My Documents or My Network Places).

3. Double-click each entry and set its REG_SZ (String value) "Value data" to a path and folder name or its REG_DWORD "Value data" to a numeric ID. Here is a partial list of defined numeric IDs.

4. Close the registry editor.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\Placesbar]
"Place0"=dword:00000020
"Place1"=dword:00000031
"Place2"="c:\\temp"
"Place3"="d:\\data"
"Place4"="d:\\articles"

This change will not affect applications within the Microsoft Office suite but will affect applications, such as Notepad and Microsoft Paint, Internet Explorer, in short all applications that use the Open and Save common dialog boxes. Each new entry you add will replace one of the default quick links.

Here are two VBScripts that you can use (or modify to your own taste) to help you modify the default Places:

PlacesSet.vbs to customize Places and
PlacesDefault.vbs to get the "factory defaults" back.

Note: To avoid accidental running of the script, the scripts on this web server are stored as *.vb_ file. Clicking on the link will bring up the script in the browser. From there you can save it for later use, simply by selecting All text in the browser window and copy/pasting it into your own newly created .vbs script file.