Maelstorm

I beleive that you can also do this using the OEM Preinstallation Kit, as well as a number of other little tweaks and hacks that are normally reserved for OEMs.

If you select other, then please explain by replying.

I have figured out a method to switch login screens on the fly without using LoginStudio. This is a registry hack. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin] "Text"="Enable Custom Logon Screen" "Type"="checkbox" "CheckedValue"="logonuiX.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" "UncheckedValue"="logonui.exe" "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" The above registry code will add an option in Tools -> Folder Options called Enable Custom Logon Screen. And furthermore, if you want to switch between more than just one custom login screen and the original, you can do this: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin] "Text"="Enable Custom Logon Screen" "Type"="group" "Bitmap"="SHELL32.DLL,274" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenDefault] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Default Windows Logon Screen" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonui.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenA] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen A" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiA.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenB] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen B" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiB.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenC] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen C" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiC.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenD] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen D" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiD.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenE] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen E" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiE.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System\GUILogin\ScreenF] "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000002 "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Winlogon" "ValueName"="UIHost" "Text"="Logon Screen F" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"="logonuiF.exe" "DefaultValue"="logonui.exe" Note that I also have a new tree called System. The registry code for this is as follows: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\System] "Bitmap"="SHELL32.DLL,22" "Text"="System Settings" "Type"="group" Hope this helps someone.

There is no documentation on how to do this in Corel, so I submitted a support request, so we will see what happens.

So what software supports a 32-bit BMP? I have CorelDRAW 12, but it does not have a option to select a 32-bit BMP...That I'm aware of....

Does the login screen support transparencies? It seems that according to CorelDRAW, BMP files don't support alpha-channel transparencies. GIF files do, so I'm wondering if I can use a GIF file in place of a BMP file for the Logo Picture.

Um... I'm Male.

As a software developer, the one thing that I find most insulting and infurirating is that the user complains about some issue in the program that you wrote and that issue was covered in the documentation that you provided with the program. If I took the time to write the documentation, then the user should at least take the time to read it before bugging the author. That is what it's there for. If someone has a problem that is covered by the docs, then they will be ignored, completely, utterly, and with prejiduce. No answer to their posts or anything. Unless of course a bug is found, which is a different story. Wraith, I don't blame you one bit for being p*ss*d off at these incompetent fools who cannot read something as simple as a EULA, which is the one thing that you have asked them to do before using your program. If it was me, then I would add something else to make them read the documentation before they use it. At least it will act as an intelligence test to see if they can figure out how use the program. Hardline attitude? You bet, and I will not appologize for it either. If you want to use my program, they you will have to prove to me that you read the documentation before I help you.

It's actually logonuiX.exe in your \windows\system32 folder.

You know, I was wondering about that myself. It seems that you have to do certian things in order to make the countdown stop. Because Windows is handling the menuing, it may not be possible to make the countdown stop when the user opens a menu but only when a user actually selects a menu item because a selection generates an event code and sends it to the event handler in the program.

Agreed. Look at the EULA fiasco.

Is there anything missing from those directions??? All the other directions state to copy all the files in the temporary folder but here just the setup.exe. What am I to re-package with the setup.exe? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sorry about the late reply... You only copy the setup.exe from mozilla as it supports the silent install. The Mozilla package itself will install silently, so all you need is setup.exe to replace and repackage the other software.

Very well then.

Good find. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks

Interesting, but I'm not suprized. The information that I found is out of the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit Documentation. It seems that the format of the registry key is broken down into sub-fields... The Administrator SID on my system is as follows: S-1-5-21-1202660629-1606980848-854245398-500 According to the documentation here, the breakout is as follows: S-R-X-Y1-Y2-Y3-Y4...Yn-RD S means that it's a SID R - Revision Level X - Authority Value Y - Sub-Authority (Domain Identifier) RD - Relative Identifier It seems that the Y fields are somewhat unique to each system. I have 3 computers and for the administrator on all three, the y3 field is the same. I'm not sure what the significance of that is. Also, the last number, 500 is also the same. As to what 21 means in the y1 field, I have yet to find any documentation on that, although it seems that 32 means builtin (according to the page). Something else that is interesting...I have found the username under the following key: HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1202660629-1606980848-854245398-500\Volatile Environment\ Inside there, there is a homepath value that contains the username.... Hmm.... I'm feeling inspired...... a = enumertate registry keys for x = 0 to ubound(a) key = reg.getvalue a(x) & \Voltile Environment\HOMEPATH uidtemp = split(key, "\") uid = uidtemp(ubound(uidtemp)) if (ubound(uidtemp) = 8 then uidclass = uidtemp(8) else uidclass = uidtemp(4) next Or something like that. It's psudeo code, but I think you get the idea...

Yes. After I did some more searching on Microsoft's website, I found the following information which might be usefull. It seems that some of the fields in the SIDs is non-changing. The S-1-5 indicates WinNT Authority, and the last group of numbers indicates the group or type of account, for administrators that number is 500. I'm still looking though. Well Known SIDs SID Appendix

How do you get a user's SID (security identifier)? I guess it changes for each installation, and I took a look at the getsid tool from Microsoft (which is less than useless for me.). The issue here is this: For REGINI.EXE, it says to reference the current user, you need to put this in the file: \Registry\User\User_SID (where User_SID is the current user's security identifier) So, how do you find the SID? I'm thinking of writing a VBS program to do this.

If I'm the topic starter, then how do I change the name of a topic, or even the topic description? Or can I? Later.

Have a look at Benjamin´s Website. At the bottom you will find a donation section with his bank account details. I also did not fly to Bingen, Germany to have a few beer with him ( how about it, Benjamin? ) .... Bye, Alex <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I was looking for a PayPal account or something where I could wire a few dollars to him.

The previous thread that has the old version and some basics on how to use it can be found here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=42268 I have included a readme.txt file that you need to read before you ask for help. READ THE README.TXT FILE INSIDE THE ARCHIVE. I will not help you if you ask a question that has been answered in the readme.txt file. If you need assistance, then post a support request to this thread. DO NOT EMAIL ME AS I DO NOT RESPOND TO EMAILS. PMs here on the board are ok. INTRODUCTION Although I have taken great care in programming and testing this software, so in the event that you do find a bug, please let me know. There are some defaults at the beginning of the program files which should make sense for most systems. But, if you need to modify something, don't modify anything below the DO NOT MODIFY line. Futhermore, if for whatever reason that you feel compeled to modify something below the DO NOT MODIFY line, I would like to know about it. I'm also taking feature requests as well. But, before anyone asks, I'm not going to implement the file-io structures at this time so don't bother to ask. This script was designed to work on my system, but I have made a number of improvments. One of which is the inclusion of most of the XML structures that XPlode understands. Also new and improved is better syntax error checking on field data and record order. One very important change is the addition of the START and END directives. These MUST be present and MUST be the FIRST and LAST records in your DB files. The GenData.vbs script which automatically generates the db files used by GenXplodeXML.vbs has been updated to reflect this. Another important change is the addition of a third command line paramter. The config file parameter. This allows you to take a bare config that consists of data from <config> to </config> (tags included) and automatically insert it into the output file. The insertion is as-is with no modification to the config data. Another noteworthy change is the error messages themselves. Many error messages will have 2 line numbers. One with the acutal error, and the other line is not actually where the error is, but is related to the error. This type of error message is most common in stucture formatting errors. The new command line format is as follows: cscript.exe genxplodexml.vbs <input file> <output file> [<config file>] -OR- wscript.exe genxplodexml.vbs <input file> <output file> [<config file>] The new config file option is used with the CONFIG directive. If you have a CONFIG directive in your DB file, then you *MUST* specifiy it on the command line or in the GUI. If you don't, it will display an error and exit. FILES There are 2 archives attached to this post. You will need 7-zip to extract them which can be found here. I recommend version 3.13 as it is the latest release version. The first archive, Novice.7z, is the one that most of you will want. It contains the GenData.vbs and GenXPlodeXML.vbs programs as well as a number of example files. The second archive, Advanced.7z, is ment for ADVANCED users and discusses advanced topics such as on the fly XML code generation that can be used to dynamically configure an XPlode installation. This follows the architecture that I have developed for my installation system. Because it's for me, it may or may not work with your setup without major modifications. Because of this, no support is offered for the advanced archive unless you discover a bug. Note that for the advanced package, you will also need the Novice package as well. ADVANCED My installation system current has 3 major sections. They are listed as follows: FONTS MEDIA SOFTWARE Each section is divided into multiple categories. In the advanced archive, you will find a number of tools to help facilitate this. One of which is a new tool called GenMainIndex.vbs. It takes the filelist.txt file and converts it into a batch file that contains the main index. You will also need to modify the file SYSTEM-GENXML.CMD to match the paths used in your system. Read the readme2.txt file for information on making modifications to the software, including adding new categories and sections. Once again, any questions or problems, reply to this thread. PMs are ok, but do not email. [EDIT 04-10-2005] A coding error was discovered in the advanced package in the CMD script file SYSTEM-GENXML.CMD. This error is clearly my fault and I do appologize for making such a supid mistake and not catching it sooner. [EDIT 04-20-2005] As stated in the information above, you need to use 7-zip to extract the files in the archive. 7-zip can be found here: http://www.7-zip.org/ I recommend using version 3.13 as that is the last release version. Please make a note of this.

Thanks. Of course I agree. But what I missed a bit were those noobs who always asked "How do I..." questions. There are usually enough of them. But may be such noobs don't use WIHU which is also great . I think everyone here using WIHU are more or less competent users which is also good. Well, most users don't make unattended installs of their software either. I know, you are right. That was my initially reason for creating Version 3.0 which was entirely in object oriented way (c++, WTL/ATL) One of the time consuming things was to create new TreeControl which should be at least as capable as current one. It should support riched text, icons and more ... of course Im able to create this, but this would take a long time. It's easier to create such an control from bottom up than reusing windows controls because there are some restrictions by using them. Some things are already done, like resizable property sheet windows (you can find the source on www.codeproject.com in WTL section). I'll have a look at it. I got busy so I didn't get to send you that email. But the other part of using objects was that each object in itself would represent one data item. That way, to add data items, all you have to do is create another instance of an object. Depending on how you declare the methods, all the objects will use the same code, but occupy different memory areas for the data. Because the visual layout to the user is in a tree format, have the objects layed out in memory the same way using a double linked binary tree. Then the main loop can "walk the tree" to do things like display or execute. In my opinion, it would also be easier to add functionality to the object model once the program engine was written. I have found two things that take the most time in any programming project: 1. The user interface. 2. The program engine.

I've got something out right now that has been written completely in VBScript. And I've got a major update that should be ready in a week or so (Probably by this weekend). It works quite well from the command line, so it can be used in scripts to generate XML on the fly, which is what I've been doing.

I'm not exactly a beginner, but the word XML in of itself is intimidating. I know some HTML, so it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Furthermore, when I was first introduced to XPlode, some of the older release versions had virtually no documentation, or outdated documentation, and the examples did not help very much as it was not documented very well as to what was available, optional, and mandatory. The hardest part is and always will be coding the XML itself. After awhile, those tags get very tedious to keep typing. That is why I came up with a XML code generator specifically for XPlode. Although this has little to do with this thread, the other glaring omission that I find in XPlode is the lack of any sort of conditionals to control the installation during an unattended setup. That's the other main reason why I wrote a XML code generator. Because of this, I have come up with a way to use WIHU to generate a config, use my XML code generator tools to convert it to XML format, and then use XPlode to install the software.

It's not a problem. As a software developer myself, I do understand that it is very time consuming. Your studies should take precedence though, and I will not try to convince you otherwise. But, if you need help writing the code due to your personal situation, I can personally lend you a hand, but I don't understand Windows programming all that well myself. I understand C, but not C on Windows because most of my software programming experience in C is on the Unix platform. I am learning though. Also, my plate is also a little full right now too. Hmm, of course it doesn't necessarily mean this, but it is an indication. I think more people would use WIHU if there were an WIHU Ini file creation tool for easy manipulating the ini file. But currently there is no time to create this. Once again, this is quite understandable. But another poster mentioned this before, but maybe the reason that you do not hear alot about your tool is probably because people don't have problems with it...which is a good thing. I can only speak for myself, but I only speak up if I want a new feature, find a bug, or have some other problem with it. I agree, but it cannot be done in VBScript unless you use a prepared source file so that the script can convert it over to the ini format. I did something similar with my XPlode XML code generator, which I'm still working on, but the ini file format presents some odd programming problems. Any ini creation tool would make it easier to use WIHU, but the tool itself would need to be easy to use. I just thought of something...Taking a page from WPI, why not have the creation tool embedded inside WIHU? There you could just highlight an item, right click to edit, and have a dialog box popup...Or add new sub-tree, etc..., etc.., etc... Hmm, does it mean, installation done by XPlode is better than WIHU installation routine? If yes, what do you miss in WIHU? The main thing that XPlode has going for it is that it is more visually appealing than WIHU. But, for user interface ease of use, WIHU beats XPlode. I'm sorry, but XPlode's UI for the select install is...lacking, IMO. On my setup, because XPlode does not support conditionals on an unattended install, I use WIHU to call a script file with an index. From there, it automatically generates the needed data file and converts them to XML format for installation under XPlode during the RunOnceEX installation at first login (I call it Phase 3). WIHU runs at the T-12 portion of the setup (I call it Phase 2) and all the needed files get built at that time. Believe me, changing anything in my code is more difficult from day to day;) Benjamin Kalytta <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Not to discount your programming abilities, and I'm not trying to be rude or insulting, but I do have some constructive critisim about your source code. The one glaring problem that I have with it is the fact that there are almost no comments in the code. For someone like me who is new to Windows programming, that would be a big help in following the logic of the program. Hello. That brings up a good point, but how? There is no way to specify a donation that I could see. Futhermore, I would buy him a few beers or take him out to a movie or two, but I'm in the United States. So right now the only thing that I can offer is to help work on the software. Benjamin: And I have a really good idea about the software architecture of WIHU... I noticed in your source code that you are using monilithing programming practices. Why not use objects? This type of application would be much easier to implement I think. I'll email my ideas to you.

Agreed. It could also mean that people use it and have no problems with it ! Which is a good thing ... second that... please dont discontinue it <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Which was the point that I was making.