Ok, so in 2.42, open recent has been allowed to remember more files instead of just one. However, mine is already starting to get cluttered, and on top of that it does not remove from the list any blend files that I delete.
So is there any way to limit or at the very least reduce the number of files that blender links to in this menu?
.Blog file…
what OS? linux? You are probably already calling Blender from a shell script, so just add one line after Blender runs:
mv .Blog .Blog.backup && head -nXX .Blog.backup > .Blog
Which will always keep it trimmed to the last XX files opened, but keep a backup of the full list. For that session anyway.
I was on Windows, so I just manually edited the .blog file.
Thanks for the help.
Heilos gives away a freeware version of head, for Windows boxes… the syntax would be basically the same for a cmd.exe batch file…
move .Blog .Blog.backup
head -XX .Blog.backup > .Blog
I only suggest you make it automated because it’s just going to keep growing… I’m sure you could modify a startup Python associated with Blender or even find and change the variable that decides how many lines to keep… still, this is probably the fastest. 
You can download head here… http://www.textpad.com/add-ons/index.html
So it’s only going to grow? Why couldn’t the developers make it so that their were only 5 or 10 or something?
According to:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/2_42_Features___Fixes.770.0.html
It will retain the last 10 recent files. Panic over 