Add Internet Explorer 7 Icon to the Desktop in Windows Vista

The main benefit to using this icon instead of a shortcut is that you can quickly get to the Internet Options page by right-clicking and choosing Properties.

You’ll notice that you can also use “Start Without Add-ons”, which is helpful for troubleshooting problems.

To add this icon back, we’ll need to use a registry hack. You can  manually create the registry entries.

Open regedit.exe using the Start menu search or run box, and then navigate down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel

In the right-hand pane, add a new 32-bit DWORD value with the following name and value:

Key Name: {871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}

Value: 0

You should be able to right-click on the desktop and choose Refresh, and the new icon should show up.

Add Encrypt / Decrypt Options to Windows Vista Right-Click Menu

If you use the built-in file encryption in Windows Vista, you might be interested in adding an option to the right-click menu to more easily encrypt and decrypt your files, rather than having to use the file properties dialog.Adding this to the menu couldn’t be simpler – there’s only a single registry key to add.

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box, and then find the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

In the right-hand pane, create a new 32-bit DWORD value called EncryptionContextMenu and give it a value of 1.

Now when you right-click on a file, you’ll see a new option called Encrypt.When you choose this option, you’ll receive the following dialog, asking if you want to encrypt just the file, or also the parent folder. You can also choose just the file as the default.Once the files are encrypted, you’ll notice that the title of the file is now green, indicating that it’s been encrypted. The right-click option will also now change to Decrypt.Definitely much simpler… makes me wonder why this wasn’t a built-in option