One of the many annoying aspects of Windows XP is the fact that for whatever reason, the Start Menu will not organize your applications alphabetically. It will sort them in the order that they were installed. This can get annoying, however, because when you've been on a system for a while and installed a lot of programs, you might have a hard time finding one of them. I've tried to manually order my start menu through My Computer, but this is only temporary as you'll most likely install more programs after that.
I was reading through a book on Windows XP tweaks, and found the solution to this problem. It's not even that difficult, which only feeds my conspiracy theory that Microsoft gets a cut of all of the books that are written showing users how to fix UI problems that shouldn't even be there. Who the heck EVER thought it was a good idea to organize your start menu in the order that programs are installed? That only feeds my conspiracy theory that Microsoft programmers don't actually use the Microsoft products that they release upon the rest of us (no, I'm not that paranoid; I'm just having some fun with this but it is plausible).
Here is what you do, which will take less time to explain than my 2 paragraph introduction above. You must edit your registry, which means that you *might* want to create a restore point or back up before you do this. I didn't.
Click Start and then Run. Type "regedit". When the registry editor opens, click the plus sign to expand "HKEY_CURRENT_USER". Then navigate down the tree in this order: Software->Microsoft->Windows->Current Version->Explorer->Menu Order. You'll see a folder labled "Start Menu" (on both of the systems that I tried, it was "Start Menu2". Right click and select delete. Answer yes. Click Start, programs, and look at the beautiful new User Interface (UI) where all of your programs are now sorted alphabetically just like they were in Windows 98.
I've done this on 2 systems, one XP Home and the other XP Professional. It worked on both.
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