As a developer, you create many projects and open many more third party projects files over the course of your development career. In doing so however, your “Recent Projects” sidebar in the startpage in VS 2008 becomes cluttered with some things that end up being temporary anyways. Here’s how to clean it up:

Open regedit.

Navigate through the registry to this spot:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList

and you’ll see a list that looks similar to this:

File1 Reg_Expand_Sx Path
File2 Reg_Expand_Sx Path 
File3 Reg_Expand_Sx Path
File4 Reg_Expand_Sx Path

You need to delete the values you don’t want, and then rename all the remaining ones (that you want to keep) in sequential order, while ensuring there are no gaps in between.