John Utigliano wants to know how he can get rid of the URLs from his browser's drop-down location box. Since your browser can store only a limited number of URLs in that box (18 in Navigator 4.5, 25 in IE 5), a simple way to "fill up" the box is by typing a single character and then pressing <Enter> again and again until your URL list is, well, history.

A quicker way, in Navigator 4.5, is to select Edit-Preferences. Select Navigator on the left and in the box on the right, select Clear Location Bar-OK. If, when you reload Communicator, your URLs reappear in the drop-down box, the browser is pulling them out of the Registry thanks to some old installation of the browser. From Windows' Start menu, select Run, type regedit and press <Enter>. Click your way to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Netscape/Netscape Navigator/URL History. On the right side of the screen, click the Name column and delete the information in the Value data field. Click OK. You also must clear the URLs from prefs.js (that's how you'd clear URLs from the drop-down box in older versions of Communicator). Open the file in any text editor (it's usually in C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\yourname); then look for lines that start with "user_pref("browser.url_history" and delete those lines.

In IE 5, select Tools-Internet Options and under the General tab, click Clear History. To prevent Explorer from storing any URLs ù in case you want to keep your boss from finding out which Web sites you've visited at work ù set 'Days to keep pages in history' to 0,and click OK.