Classic Shell: Forum

How can I prevent the "Pin to Start menu (Classic Shell)" option from adding duplicate shortcuts for the same application or shortcut? The app or shortcut will allow me to use the "Pin to Start menu (Classic Shell)" option as many times as I want and it just adds duplicates of the shortcut to the start menu. The option to "Pin to Taskbar" doesn't do that. It only allows pinning to the taskbar one time. once it is pinned, the option changes to unpin. This would be great if the pin to start menu (classic shell) did the same.

I want to keep the Pin shell extension as light-weight as possible because it is potentially loaded in multiple processes.
Just don't pin the same program multiple times.

Unfortunately the only way I've found to prepopulate the initial start menu (what you see when you first click the start button) with specific shortcuts is to use a vbscript which invokes the "Pin to start menu (Classic Shell)" which works great, however when the script runs at logon, it keeps adding the same shortcuts to the list that is already there, creating a mess. In windows 7, the "Pin to start menu" function only worked for the shortcut if it wasn't already there. if the short cut was there already there, the pin to start menu function changed to "unpin from start menu". Then the vbscript to prepopulate the start menu never put up duplicates. It worked great.

"Pin to start menu (Classic Shell)" doesn't do anything magical. Depending on your settings, it either copes the shortcut to the main Start Menu folder "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" or the Classic Shell's pinned folder "%APPDATA%\ClassicShell\Pinned". You can make your vbscript delete the contents of that folder before copying the new shortcuts there. You don't need to mess with the shell extension.