Up until now, forcing Media Center to display only the start menu strips you actually wanted was quite the ordeal. You needed to edit registry settings and apply patches to force the strips off and on. Thankfully, there’s a new program available from Mikinhosoft that takes the work out of working with start menu strips.

This handy little app gives you easy access to what menu strips are displayed through a couple of menus. The program supports both Vista and Windows 7, automatically detecting which version suites your current setup. To get started just download the program from Mikinhosoft and run the program, no installation is needed.

After running the program select the tab you’d like to edit the settings for. Per User allows you to set different start menu strips for each user on the current PC. You must be logged into the account you wish to edit with this tab. The All Users tab allows you to set start menu strip options across all users on the current PC. To use the All Users tab be sure to run the program as an Administrator.

This little app is certainly easier than doing all those registry edits on your own and doesn’t require patching of the system files to remove the Movies strip.

That’s really all there is to it. Unfortunately, at this point there’s still no easy way to add new strips to the Media Center start menu though. Hopefully, we’ll see something available soon!

Until then subscribe to Hack7MC using one of these free subscriptions to get up to date information on tweaking and hacking your Windows Media Center!