Dozens of people have written in and expressed their hatred of the new breadcrumb feature in Windows Vista's Explorer address bar, and especially because you simply can't turn it off... until now.

Standing next to Andreas Verhoeven is probably dangerous, because he's simply on fire. He read Mysticgeek's rant on the subject, and within hours had emailed us the first version of an application that will disable the breadcrumbs in explorer.

Here is the default explorer breadcrumb:

And here's the address bar after running AveNoBreadcrumb. It will completely disable the breadcrumbs.

image

Installing AveNoBreadCrumb

  1. Download and unzip the file
  2. Double-click on AveNoBreadCrumb.exe
  3. Close the current explorer window, and open a new one.
  4. Magic!

Adding to Startup

  1. Open an explorer window and type in shell:Startup into the address bar to get to your startup folder.
  2. Create a shortcut in this folder to AveNoBreadCrumb.exe

Uninstalling

  1. Remove the startup shortcut, if any.
  2. Double-click on AveNoBreadCrumb.exe to disable it.
  3. Close the current explorer window and re-open.

If you have a great idea for a new application or would like to see something changed, post your idea on the bounty program forum.

Download AveNoBreadCrumb [mirror] from Ave's Vista Stuff

Note: Andreas has a donate button on his site, worth considering giving him a donation for his hard work.