Gnome Feature Request – Add Option to Disable Recent Documents List
This has long been an annoyance to me and I ended up using a hack that is floating around various places on the net to in effect disable the Recent Documents from appearing:
the following needs to be done in a terminal as your regular user (not root) in your user’s home directory
rm .recently-used.xbel
mkdir .recently-used.xbel
This in effect will disable your Recent Documents from your Gnome Menu.
What is strange about this is that a bug report has been filed since early 2005 and then option has still not been added.
To do my part, I registered on the bugtracker and re-iterated the option. If you want this added then the only way is to let them know on the launchpad. If you find the exclusion of disabling this feature annoying then make a comment on the bug tracker. After all, complaining is better defended when you actually do something productive to change the original annoyance 