To those of you who just as I like to keep a visible list of all files on your system including hidden and system files/folders, you may run into an annoyance with Vista’s built-in burner. On the drive you will always see a “Files ready to be burned onto disc” category containing desktop.ini. The location of the desktop.ini file always seems to be recreated by Windows on startup, so you can’t actually delete the file. What’s worse, the one popular way to disable it via Group Policy Editor isn’t available in Vista Home Basic as gpedit is missing altogether. And nobody really uses the Vista burner anyway.

Disabling Vista’s burner is possible via regedit however. Navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\CD Burning\Drives key. There you will see a series of hex-named volumes. This is actually convenient since you can disable burning for individual drives. If you’re not sure which one is which, just do the next step to all of them: set the value of IsImapiDataBurnSupported to 0. A logoff or restart might be required. Don’t remember cause it was a long time ago…