Haha, I had the same thoughts when I saw it. I was like 'wtf do you want?' I have no idea where that came from or if it's even possible in newer versions of max.
phew... well yes, that shelf was "the shit" in magma/R3 back in the day. i love it, too, but autodesk disabled it by default around R6 for "performance reasons" afair. so now, every upgrade is a pain. i usually manage to do it by copying over my old settings files from a R4/5 install and hacking those. the functionality is…