Windows 10 How to replace Winlogon Shell

[Zlatko]

Hello,

i used to replace the explorer.exe from the registrykey "winlogon" with my own startup .EXE .
This worked like a charm for Win XP and later on for Win 7 (had to deactivate UAC for it to work on Win7).
Now on Windows 10 i cannot get it to work at all. As usual i replaced the regkey "winlogon" with my own shell and i also deactivated the UAC. I also tried to link the "winlogon" to a shortcut that will start my .EXE with adminrights but still it does not work.
After the initial boot up the screen just stays black...it does not start my .EXE .

Sorry for my bad englisch but i hope it´s possible to understand what i am trying to do achieve here.

Thanks in advance.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi,

Please provide make/model of the computer with Win10 you are asking about. Did you upgrade from Win7 or an earlier version of Windows on that computer?

What exactly is the purpose of your starup.EXE? And what code is it written in? Did you use WSL? or PHP; or something else?
Also, is your Windows 32bit or 64bit? This sounds like an optional program; so not absolutely necessary to run Win10.

<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

 

[ussnorway]

• Start up.exe is the old first run key that was in xp,7 & 8... it's been devalued in 8.1 and 10 but the code still works.

The idea is to place program/ app icons in it and Windows will try to run them after booting to the desktop

for example this screen above has firefox set into the startup.exe

I agree with Bigbearjedi it would be helpful to know what you want the system to run?

This sounds like an optional program; so not absolutely necessary to run Win10

Correct it's only optional and there are reports of it being used by some malware to do stuff you won't like but imo it's just not that useful so thats why Microsoft devalued it.

i used to replace the explorer.exe from the registrykey "winlogon" with my own startup .EXE .

You lose me here mate as there is no reason to stuff about in the registry and I supect you have buggered the entries since the system sounds not to be booting now.

 

[Zlatko]

Hi BigBearJedi and the ussnorway

thank you for taking the time to respond
Sorry for being unprecise in my first post but i will try to answer your questions now

Shuttle DS 81 an i3 with 8GB Ram why is the hardware important

Upgrad from Win 7 Pro 64bit to Win 10 Pro 64bit

Purpose of my exe is to completely put the system into a kiosk state
So it will boot directly into my video player
No task bar will be visible and so on
Maybe it was a fault to call it startup exe here because that´s not what it is called so it has nothing to do with an eventually existing startup from windows
It is coded in dotnet

Optional
Well it is what we need to sell our product
on Win XP and Win 7 i could simply go to
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Winlogon and change the Shell from explorer exe to my own exe and it would work like a charm

You can try this right now (you are not rigging your system at all) by replacing explorer exe to e g C windows system32 cmd exe
When you reboot now it will just open a cmd shell window and nothing else
Can fix it by changeing the value back to explorer exe
It is also interesting to note that while this booting into the cmd exe works
same goes for notepad exe for example but it does not however work with calc exe for some dubious reasons i can´t grasp

EDIT I right now have to butcher this post into oblivion because the forum software is giving me a sneaky url detected error message when trying to post
So i am sorry for the stupid format i have to use

EDIT2 I can´t get this text to be posted !! This is enraging sadly
I will now remove all the dots i used in the text sorry

EDIT3 still not able to post it
i will remove all punctuation marks now

EDIT4 still sneaky url
i will just shoot myself now

EDIT5 Hah! i just now posted some lines and edited some lines to it againg and again and no more sneaky url detected error messages....this is buggy ^^.

 

[ussnorway]

No task bar will be visible and so on
Maybe it was a fault to call it startup exe here because that´s not what it is called so it has nothing to do with an eventually existing startup from windows
It is coded in dotnet

This type of boot is called "Alternative Shells" and you set the boot option by pressing [windows key]+[r] type "msconfig" (no quotes) then select it.

I don't see any point to them myself but some people do... this list shows some of the big makers and once you have your program picked and the shell made then you just point msconfig to that shell. I've only ever worked with Talisman myself so I cann't comment on any of the others sorry... good luck with it.

List of alternative shells for Windows - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia