How To Pin Any Folder to Start Menu in Windows 7

Even though it’s not longer available in Windows 8, Start Menu is still a convenient place that can be very handy for a lot of us. You can pin almost all programs to it and you can do it easily from the right-click context menu. However, you can’t pin folders to it, which sucks to people like me navigating through folders pretty much all day long.
Here is a registry hack that you can use to trick the system to allow you to pin almost any folders you are frequently using to Start Menu.
First, launch Registry Editor by pressing Win+R shortcut, typing “regedit”, and hitting Enter.
Then, navigate to the following location:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers.

And right click the empty space on the right panel, then New and Key, to create a new key name as below:

{a2a9545d-a0c2-42b4-9708-a0b2badd77c8}

The result is immediate. You don’t have to restart the machine to see it. Just go to the
folder you want to pin, hold down the Shift key and right-click it, and select the new added Pin to Start Menu command.

And here is the result, the folder appears in the Start Menu. Later on, you can right click the folder and click Remove From This List if you don’t want it listed there anymore.

As W7H reader Stan suggested, here (right click the link and save as…) is also a registry import file that you can download and import.