The other day I was trying to pin an executable to Win 7's taskbar and having no luck: When displaying its context menu, there was no 'Pin to the Taskbar' option (or 'Pin to the Start Menu' for that matter). I did some googling around to find out what to do and came across various articles about creating shortcuts to shortcuts, editing the resultant properties, or loading up the .lnk file itself into Notepad and so on--all seemed pretty awful hacks if any actually worked.
Finally, I came across a post by Rick Strahl in his blog that explains what is actually going on. In short, Win 7 keeps a list of 'disallowed' text. If the pathname contains a disallowed text string, the 'Pin to x' options are taken away. On my particular machine, it looked the string 'help' might be the issue so I removed that from the AddRemoveNames key. No luck. Rebooted. No luck. Since I didn't care to fight it any further, I simply deleted everything in the AddRemoveApps, AddRemoveNames, CutList and HostApps keys and rebooted. That solved the problem.
While trying to figure the issue out, I also came across this forum post that explains where the Taskbar's shortcuts are actually stored: C:\Users\(User-Name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
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