A good friend to all of us here in the Atlanta .NET community, Jim Wooley, is changing jobs. Today is his last day with his current employer and he IMs me with a question.
“Matt”, he IMs. “Here’s a SQL Server MVP type of question for you. In 2005’s Management Studio, how do you remove a server from the dropdown list of available servers? I don’t want to leave my former employer with the connection details to the VB.NET User Group’s database.”
“Simple!”, I write back. “All you have to do is delete C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL
Server\90\Tools\Shell\mru.dat.”
“Thanks a million!” Jim replies. “You’re swell!”
Ok – so that conversation didn’t take place EXACTLY like that. What really happened was Jim asked me and I told him that I had no idea how to achieve his goal in SQL 2005. In SQL 2000, to remove a server from the recent connections list, you modify this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Client\PrefServers. There is no corresponding registry key for SQL 2005.
So I took advantage of my MVP status and posted a question to the private MVP newsgroup microsoft.private.mvp.sqlserver. It was here that several people took stabs at the answer before Paul A Mestemaker II and Maciek Sarnowicz (both internal to the Microsoft SQL Server team) gave me the final answer. Thanks a bunch for your help guys!