I recently purchased a new Vista machine and used the easy transfer tool to get my settings from my old xp machine. This created a "shortcut to History" folder in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows, or at least in one of these folders. To be able to see the shortcut I had to set my file settings to show hidden files and also unselect hide protected operating files. I deleted the shortcut and opened IE 7 to find Google was now in my History!!

No registry editing, no changing .ini files, just a simple delete of an obsolete shortcut that confused IE. I hope that this helps anyone else like myself that has read multiple threads on multiple sites just to see people arguing with each other and talking about a lot of stuff that makes no sense.