NSIS - shortcut in the left side of the start menu

Question

Windows XP start menu is divided into two parts, the left and the right. I'm able to add to the all programs folder of the start menu, but how do you add a shortcut for your application on the left side of the start menu?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is no official (i.e., supported and more or less guaranteed to work in the future and on future versions of windows) way to do this (at all, not just with nsis - the nsis part is the easy part of the question), see http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/03/54760.aspx .

That being said, the pinned entries are stored in a binary blob in the registry, in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage\Favorites . Other people have done what you are trying to do, see e.g. http://groups.google.gm/group/microsoft.public.platformsdk.shell/browse_thread/thread/c11161e983dd8a32 , but I know of none that have made code available to parse this binary blob. Depending on how determined you are to get this to work, you could do it yourself.