[Deke40]

There has been a lot of discussion about typed urls in the drop down list. They are almost impossible to get rid of. Here is a method to at least make them harder to view unless you know this trick:

To prevent typed urls from being recorded in the drop down window, in either Internet Explorer or Netscape, press Ctrl + O (the letter 'o', not a zero) and enter the address. If you use this you will get a drop down list and if you pick from there it will not show up in the drop down list on your main address bar in windows.

If a person knows this method you are in the same boat as they can look on the Ctrl+O dropdown box and see the url.

[Dark Star]

Deke ...

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around......

press Ctrl + O (the letter 'o', not a zero) and enter the address. If you use this you will get a drop down list and if you pick from there it will not show up in the drop down list on your main address bar in windows.

I'm sure it's just me that is not understanding it and the light bulb may turn on here at some point.

If a person knows this method you are in the same boat as they can look on the Ctrl+O dropdown box and see the url.

Ok now you've lost me


Here's my 2 cents...

Deleting Typed URL's

Trim this list down or remove all of the entries. Here's how.

Run REGEDIT (Start,Run...,Regedit)

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/TypedURLs

Select some or all values except (Default) in the right pane

Hit the delete key and confirm.

DS

[brendandonhu]

Both work for me.
Deke's method does not put the URL in the drop down list at all, Dark Star's method allows you to remove certain addresses from the list after they are already there.
Control+O (actually it was Command+O on a Mac) is also how I got around it when our school removed the URL bar from Netscape on all the computers so we could only go to bookmarked sites.

[bassetman]

Hehe

Tricky tricky!

[Deke40]

DS-That will clear the drop down urls but if you start typing the first letter of that same url you deleted in the Registry it will show up with Autocomplete if it is on. If you use the Ctrl+O method it will not show up even with Autocomplete on.

I posted this before but it helped to understand why typed urls are hard to get rid of:

I did some more research and found this in a November 2000 posting :There are 2 ways that address may remain to be seen by others.
1) If you hit the drop down arrow, and see a bunch of addresses that you want to get rid of, these can be deleted by clearing the history in Internet Explorer:

Go to "Tools" then "Internet Options" then use the "Clear History" Button or just to clear the dropdown list in the searchbar to to Start/Settings/Taskbar & Start Menu/Start Menu Programs/click Clear.

2) The second way that an old address will come back to haunt you:
If you start to type, and the address of a site that you have visited before, appears in the address bar, then the site is stored in your favorites folder, and needs to be deleted from there.

If you don't want anyone to see where you've been surfing, clear the history, and don't store these pages in your favorites, because even if you give them a different name in favorites, the real url will appear on your address bar when you type the first few letters of it.

END OF QUOTE

I probably did an overkill but I exported my favorites and cookies then deleted both and went into DOS and did a deltree of index.dat, history, and cookies. The only urls that came up when I start typing were two shortcuts I had on my desktop and shortcuts on my taskbar. The only problem is when you put your favorites back,the urls come back. At least you now know how to be rid of the little devils for as long as you can get by without your favorites.

Deke

[Dark Star]

Hey Thanks.... I see it now

The Ctrl+O is like the RUN in that they both work the same way... and they look alot the same.

DS

[needboost]

But... I seem to have a URL that doesn't want to disappear. I've done the clear history, and i know i never book marked the site. ONce I start typing... www.s
it shows up on the drop down menu
www.somethingsite.com

I have also gone to the typed urls registry and deleted everything out.

Any other thoughts on how to remove this? It seems everything else has disappeared...

[Deke40]

Did you go to DOS and do a deltree on History, cookies and Tempor~1?

Also:
Go to "Tools" then "Internet Options" then use the "Clear History" Button or just to clear the dropdown list in the searchbar to to Start/Settings/Taskbar & Start Menu/Start Menu Programs/click Clear.

[needboost]

Thanks Deke - I've tried the Clear History button.. and will try the search button info you described,.

On the deltree- what do i exactly need to type in dos?

thanks

ps sorry... i'm def not a techguy, more like technoob.

thanks

[Deke40]

Enter DOS.

At the command prompt, type the following commands, pressing ENTER after each command, and pressing Y if you are prompted to confirm folder deletion:

cd\windows
deltree cookies
deltree history
deltree tempor~1
exit

NOTE: Be very careful, DO NOT deltree the Windows directory, make sure the prompts looks like this:

C:\WINDOWS\Cookies>
C:\WINDOWS\History>
C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files>

You can leave out the cookies if you want.

[needboost]

hmm.. i'm in dos prompt.. but it says that deltree is not a recognized command. Not to mention, i don't have a cookies directory in windows... nor any of the other 2... boggle.

[Deke40]

Go to Start/Shut Down and check Restart in DOS.

[Metaphoric]

Is use Win98 and ie6, is it just me or does the list of typed URLs get delete when u clear the history? It does on mine, it may just be my setting or something i have changed but im sure i havent changed any thing that drastic.

[pgriffet]

Hi all. There are a lot of solutions to ensure privacy.
First of all, use a freeware clone of IE instead of IE itself. I personally use MyIE2 which shares the dll, cookies, history and cache with IE but without the bugs and the bloat of IE. There is also CrazyBrowser, AvantBrowser, NetCaptor (this one is shareware).
These tools have options which allow to delete a single URL from the drop-down list, no need to go in the registry. You have only one instance of the program in RAM but every page is opened in a tab. So your RAM and resources (especially for 9X/ME) are not eated up as with IE. I sometimes have 50 tabs opened ( = 50 pages) and my RAM is not full, I still have more than 50 % resources free (Win98 192 MB RAM).
If I try to open 50 pages with IE, my box would be totally stuck.
They have a lot of very interesting options such as an integrated popup filter, no need for a third-party tool.

Now back to the URL. Needboost asked why some URL shows up even after a history cleared. Actually, IE is full of bugs (MS speaks about "issues"). One of these bugs is that your history is not totally cleaned when you use the standard way.

The history is stored in several index.dat files, one for each day/week/month, they are deleted by IE each day/week/month. But there is another index.dat under Windows\history\history.ie5
This one is used to store 'Visited' URL names, date and time stamps. This is the data used by I.E. for its AutoComplete function and controlling the highlighting of imbedded links on the displayed Web pages.

Note that the index.dat under \History is not visible with Explorer, you have to use a file manager like Total Commander to see what's going on with cache and history. This tool even allows to see index.dat's content in read-only and so, you can easily search for urls. All the files in TIF are visible, no "smoke and mirrors" with this amazing tool which doesn't write garbage in the registry. http://www.ghisler.com
It shows me 7 index.dat on my PC where the standard "Find files" shows me 3 index.dat, even with the option "show hidden/system files". If you run 9X/ME/NT4, you can use Winfile (the old win3.1 file manager).

You don't need a third-party tool or messing with DOS to get rid of index.dat files. As they are locked by Explorer.exe, you can't delete them under 9x/ME but there is a trick :
for the cache, just rename the folder \TIF\Content.IE5 to whatever you want. After the next reboot, a new Content.IE5 folder and 4 brand-new sub-folders are rebuild. Then you will be able to delete the entire old folder Content.IE5 with all its files. BTW, renaming a folder is a standard trick to bypass the "file in use" message.
Same for Windows\Cookies or Windows\History, just rename the folder Cookies (or History) to another name and it will be possible to delete the old index.dat in Cookies (or History) after a reboot.

I've discovered that these files occupy a part of the RAM which is normal if they are always opened but I've never read anything about this fact.
You can easily test the following : Start -> Run -> Sysmon. Add "Unused physical Memory" and note the value just after Windows startup. Now, note the size of an index.dat file (the bigger is often under content.IE5) and delete it the way I suggest. Reboot Windows, start Sysmon and look at "Unused Physical Memory". You will see that you have more RAM available, probably the size of the deleted Index.dat.
As I already have seen huge index.dat files (more than 20 MB), you can figure out that Windows will be lighter, less swapping and so on.
That's why I think it's strange that MS does not provide a way to delete these files. Even when you clear offline contents of a 20 MB index.dat, its size is always the same and the RAM is bloated with a huge file full of padding characters. As the memory handling of with 9x/ME is not what is is under XP/2K, every free MB of RAM is important.

I hardly understand MS' silence about Index.dat's as a lot of people I help on French forums are persuaded these files are spies used by MS to check our surf habits !

HTH

Pierre.

[Deke40]

Pierre-I didn't post this earlier because I figured most people wouldn't care to do it this way. This is basically the way you suggeted but with a twist:

This works in IE5.5 and IE6.0.

Without using Spider or Windows Washer you don't have to go to DOS to delete index.dat. Just go to C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5(or .IE6) and delete the Content.IE folder. It will recreate itself on the next bootup.

First go to DOS and at the prompt type in the following commands:

CD\WINDOWS\TEMPOR~1\CONTENT.IE5(or.IE6)
EDIT /75 INDEX.DAT

You will be brought to a blue screen with a bunch of binary.

Press and hold the [Page Down] button until you start seeing lists of URLs. These are the sites you have visited. When your done looking go to File>Exit. If you don't have mouse support in DOS then use the [ALT] and arrow keys.

Now delete the Content.IE folder and repeat the above and look.

PS-To delete this out of IE6.0 you have to reboot and then you can delete it from Recycle Bin after the new Content.IE folder has been recreated.

For more info on index.dat go to fxxxmicrosoft.com. Just enter the correct letters for the x's that belong to that common f word.