Question

I’m writing a software for a call-center. It’s somewhat like a ATM program: user can only interactive with it, not with underlying Windows. It takes controls when user logs in to Windows, and when user exits, it logs off Windows.

How can I do that in .NET? A demo will be much appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Replace the Windows Shell.

By that I mean Explorer.exe, by means of editing the Windows Registry. What this does for you is instead of logging on and the system running Explorer.exe which consists of the Start Menu, Taskbar and other similar features you are familiar with, it only runs your program. There is no desktop, no context menu, no taskbar, or start menu. Thus, making your application “The Shell” or the new “Explorer.exe”.

However, by doing this the user still has access to Control+Alt+Delete, so they would still be able to access the Windows Task Manager, which mind you can also be disabled via a simple Registry Key Entry.

This is the most pain free, easiest solution because you don’t even have to worry about things such as disabling the WindowsKey or other annoyances.

The registry key to this is as follows:

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

The name of the value to modify is:

Shell

And you can simply enter the value to be the fully qualified path to your program’s executable file. You will only want to do this under HKEY_CURRENT_USER and only for the account that is to run your shell program. So you will need two separate accounts.

• Administrator account
  • This account will just be a normal password protected account that will be used to manage the system
• Kiosk account
  • This account will be the account that is logged on at all times, which runs your custom shell (your application)

Additional Notes

To disable the Task Manager the registry path is as follows:

Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

The name of the value is:

DisableTaskMgr

This is a DWORD value which to enforce the policy must be set to ‘1’.