"Consequences of hiding Network Neighborhood:
Since shell support for the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) notation is handled by the Network Neighborhood, hiding the Network Neighborhood icon will prevent Explorer from accessing resources via UNCs. In order to access network resources from Explorer, you need to map them to a drive letter. Note that the MS-DOS command prompt and other applications are not affected by this setting, because they do not use the Network Neighborhood to resolve UNCs.
In particular, hiding the Network Neighborhood prevents Direct Cable Connection from displaying the contents of the host computer. Apart from this, Direct Cable Connection functions normally. "
This may not apply to a registry hack - try it and see.