How can I clear the Quicktime menu cache?

Question

My quicktime player has 10 old file names cached. They show up when I right click a running QuickTime.app ; and they show up when I choose "Show recents". They are not connected to any actual file (I've removed the files), but I cannot make them go away. The help page says to use File | Open Recent | Clear Menu, but the "Clear Menu" choice is grayed out (and no recent files appear there). Clear Menu did seem to work, exactly once, though I cannot recall if the movies were the same names or some other set.
This appears to be a bug which has two components:
Clear Menu should just work; and doesn't
QuickTimePlayer should have a preferences pane that allows me to choose a reasonable number of prior file names to cache (say 0 to 20). Somewhat amazingly, it has no preferences pane at all.

Answer 1

Jon Walker wrote:
The help page says to use File | Open Recent | Clear Menu, but the "Clear Menu" choice is grayed out (and no recent files appear there). Clear Menu did seem to work, exactly once, though I cannot recall if the movies were the same names or some other set.
This only seems to work before you delete/remove the referenced files. I.e., it appears the "Clear" routine may actually check the link(s) for validity and if no longer valid, aborts the "Clear" routine. Be advised that you get similar results if you have an active RSS reference, deleted the sourced web site, and then try to clear the RSS reference entry.
That is pretty much what I had decided. This is still a bug, though: Clear Menu should just work.
Jon Walker wrote:
QuickTimePlayer should have a preferences pane that allows me to choose a reasonable number of prior file names to cache (say 0 to 20). Somewhat amazingly, it has no preferences pane at all.
The preference already exists. Check out "System Preferences > General > Number of Recent items > Documents" option allows settings of None, 5, 10 (default), 15, 20, 30, and 50. Similar opts arew available for recent "Applications" and recent "Servers" settings. This area also controls the "Resore windows when quitting and re-opening apps" option.
This too is a bug. I do not want the same number of "recent" items for all my apps. KISS principle should be "Keep It Simple, Stupid, But Only As Simple As Possible." My usual technique is to provide an adjustable global default for such things, with added individual adjustments. That way folks who have no issue never touch it, folks with a plain vanilla requirement touch one thing and folks who have complex requirements have a complete set of valves and switches under the red cover.