I had a weird problem a while back where the history bar for IE7 on my Windows Vista Ultimate box was not showing anything at all - not even the dates. This was not like I had cleared the history, rather it was more like it was not loading it in the first place. As you can see below, not that the menu did not even have the sort options in it:

Since a large part of the functionality both Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer comes from shell extensions that are loaded through COM classes, I took a look at the folder where the history should be stored. In my case this was at:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History

Now the way Explorer (and IE7) determine which shell extensions to load is by looking in a hidden file called "desktop.ini". You may need to turn on hidden system file to be able to see it if it is not there. To do that:

  1. Click the round blue Start thing in the left corner
  2. Click on Computer
  3. Click on the Organize button on the toolbar and chose Folder and Search Options
  4. Click the View tab
  5. Click Show hidden files and folders
  6. If you want to see system files as well (which we do here) unclick "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)"
  7. Click OK

Now open the desktop.ini file in Notepad (usually double-clicking it will invoke Notepad) and ensure that it contains the following:

[.ShellClassInfo]
ConfirmFileOp=0
DefaultToFS=0
CLSID={FF393560-C2A7-11CF-BFF4-444553540000}
UICLSID={7BD29E00-76C1-11CF-9DD0-00A0C9034933}

If not, paste it in and save it. Now log off and on again and open IE7.

Hopefully your history is now back - it worked for me anyway. :)

Mark