You can remove items from (or add items to) the Vista Welcome Center. If your Windows Vista machine came bundled with a bunch of pre-loaded software and trialware (as do most consumer machines) you are likely to see promotional entries in the welcome center that may be more annoying than useful - for example, if you uninstall the cure-worse-than-the-disease anti virus software or some of the other disk-filler trialware, you will probably still see lingering but non-functional items in the Welcome Center long after you uninstalled the related programs.

How do you remove these unwelcome Welcome Center entries?

Well, you need to edit the file C:\Windows\System32\oobe\Info\oobe.xml (note that the Windows system32 directory may be located elsewhere on your machine). You should make a backup copy of the oobe.xml file before you change it.

Note: Depending on your Vista version and your UAC settings, you may have to edit the file while logged in under the system Administrator account.

Look for items bracketed by

<task>
</task>

- the offending items will be fairly obvious. Remove the ones you don't want, and be sure to delete the full

<task>

</task>

block for each task item.

Save the oobe.xml file, restart the welcome center, and check your results. If things seem terribly out of whack, you can always restore the original copy you saved. You did save a copy of the unmodified oobe.xml file, didn't you?