I was doing some experiments around storing my Users\Tivac\Videos folder on my WHS box by using the “Change Location” feature in Windows to point it at \\SERVEBOT\Videos. It works ok, though I’m not 100% happy with the outcome. Since I don’t have my local computer keeping an offline copy the icon changes, and until WHS PP3 comes out my video library is unsearchable. During the experiments I changed the Videos folder location a few times, and eventually the “TV Shows” & “Movies” folders ended up pointing to invalid UNC locations.

For whatever reason, after that point I was totally unable to remove those items. Clicking them would bring up a “This item doesn’t exist, do you want to remove it?” prompt but it didn’t do anything. Right-clicking and choosing to unpin the shortcuts wouldn’t do anything. Clicking on the little pin on the far right of each when you hover over them? Nothing. I was starting to get really annoyed by the two broken shortcuts I couldn’t do anything about.

Some searching finally led me to a solution: CCleaner. The latest version includes support for cleaning the Jump List “Recent” section but due to an oversight in the rule will also remove your pinned items. I installed it & ran it in “Analyze” mode to see what files it found and discovered that Windows 7 stores the pinned recent items & shortcuts in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\CustomDestinations (presumably Pinned items) and %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations (recent items). Note that both of these are guesses, because all of the files in the folders look like

1b4dd67f29cb1962.automaticDestinations-ms
241b89efbfdc28ac.customDestinations-ms

and aren’t text. Opening them in a hex editor also didn’t produce anything meaningful. I’ve done some trawling around looking for answers as to what file type this really is & how to modify it but nothing helpful came up. Fortunately, my problem of stuck pinned jump list items was fixed by using CCleaner to clean out all of the files in both the CustomDestinations & AutomaticDestinations folders. I had to rebuild my list of pinned items from scratch but at least they’re all valid links again!