Can I Do ANYTHING (Hack Windows, or Mod a Shell-File, or Install an Addon) To FIX Recent Items (Menu-Sorting)

In an nutshell (no pun), windows 7 sorts menu's by name.

You can drag to rearrange some, but the only 'sort option' available is 'Sort by Name'

Some background

"Jorge Coelho

June 19, 2006 at 9:06 pm

Mihai: "I wonder how difficult is to reverse-engineer the keys in"

Mihai, and others who suggested several other ways to solve this problem, of course you can always use some kind of a 'hack' (this is what I do to read the 'Recent Documents' list and the MRU programs list, for instance) but:

This is not officially supported by Microsoft and, as such, can change from Windows version to Windows version, or even service pack to service pack. It's the kind of thing Raymond Chen frowns upon, and with reason.

For instance, with Win9x it was easy to display a Recent Documents menu: just show the contents of the special Recent Documents folder. Then in Windows 2000 Microsoft changed the rules and this folder would suddenly held HUNDREDS of shortcuts. To solve this problem you had to go to an undocumented Registry key and find the actual list there. With XP, the structure of this list changed yet again.

... This are just examples, the same way that re-ordering the contents of the Start Menu is an example: don't hold on to it alone, think on a broader scale (glad some people suggested some uses for the re-ordering of Start Menu items, I actually could think of none, hehe).

...Not trying to plug my own software, but, for instance, because it is actually easy to replace the Windows tasklist (you simply hide the real Windows taskbar and do your own windows enumeration) I am able to improve on it over what Microsoft has done so far: I can provide task snapshots in XP, the user can re-order tasks by drag & drop, specify which tasks appear on the tasklist and which not, customize icons for specific programs, specify the size of icons on the tasklist, specify which mouse click does what – and I could go on…).

What I am trying to say is that if all this stuff was documented and Microsoft provided APIs for this instead of actually doing the opposite (i.e.; deliberately obfuscating the little information that is actually there) 3rd party software could actually build on the existing Windows functionality and add to it.

...

It's not deliberately obfuscated. It's just naturally obfuscated. -Raymond"

more here

About to try out classicshell, just to see if i can get recent items sorted by recency