chrbb Posted July 16, 2010 Posted July 16, 2010 No thats a server 2008/windows7 problem. I run server 2003 at the moment. Done all the research! @sidewinder seriously considering bginfo, despite everything working brilliantly on xp clients we will be having more windows 7 clients before we upgrade to server 2008 so this background thing is really bugging me now! Do you use bginfo with success on server 2003/windows 7? If so any chance of a walkthrough?
Popular Post Arthur Posted July 17, 2010 Popular Post Posted July 17, 2010 (edited) Any other ideas about what to do with empty frame? It just looks sloppy and untidy on all the login screens, at the moment I am just leaving it as is as I cannot get this DLL working but I'm interested in what other people have done about it. The reason it may not work is due to the fact that the 12223 bitmap in AuthUI.dll has an alpha channel which covers the middle of the frame. Unless you edit this alpha channel to exclude your logo, it will not be shown at all. This is what I did to get it working... Copy authui.dll from your Windows\System32 folder to your desktop. Open the copy of authui.dll you just made in Resource Hacker. Find bitmap 12223, right-click 1033 (you will need to double-click the 12223 folder to see this) and select "Save [bitmap : 12223 : 1033]...". When the Save As dialog box appears, type "12223.bmp" in the filename box and save it to your desktop. Open 12223.bmp in an image editor which can modify alpha channels. I'm going to use Photoshop since I already have it installed. Go to the Channels palette and toggle the visibility of the "Alpha 1" channel by clicking on the "eye" next to it. Click on the "Alpha 1" channel itself and the image should turn red. The red area is the part of the image which is masked by the alpha channel. Use the rectangular marquee selection tool and/or the eraser tool to remove the red area covering the centre of the frame (where you logo will go). Pay special attention to the round corners. http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2516/beforeandafter.th.png Next, click on the RGB channel and switch back to the Layers palette. Paste your school logo into the centre of the frame. It should be a maximum of 124x124 pixels in size if you want it to be within the frame border (or 126x126 pixels if you don't care). You should end up with something like this... http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/9633/12223newlogo.png Save the changes you have made to the bitmap image (File » Save) and then close Photoshop. In Resource Hacker, find bitmap 12223 again, right-click 1033 and select "Replace Resource...". In the replace bitmap dialog box, click the "Open file with new bitmap..." button, choose the 12223.bmp image you modified and then click the Replace button. Save the authui.dll (File » Save) and then close Resource Hacker. Take ownership of the original authui.dll file in the Windows\System32 folder (click here for an easy way to do this), rename it to authui.dll.bak and copy the new version saved on your desktop into this folder. You will need Administrator rights to do this. Next, configure Windows so that it doesn't display the username of the last person who logged on. You can do this via RegEdit (http://goo.gl/bNFG) or Group Policy (http://goo.gl/Ucz1). Restart the computer and you should end up with a logon screen which displays your school logo. http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/3811/newlogonscreen.png Edited July 19, 2010 by Arthur 7
Gatt Posted July 17, 2010 Posted July 17, 2010 Not sure TBH. Does replacing a single bitmap in a DLL really count as decompiling or disassembling? I would assume the answer is "yes" as this was definately the case with XP's gina.dll file (replacing the XP banner with a custom bmp) and MS had also given APIs to build your own GINA file... I have been looking to do the same thing, but until I find out if its breaks the EULA or not, I am going to hang fire for now...
chrbb Posted July 19, 2010 Posted July 19, 2010 Seriously cheesed off with backgrounds now! Tried bginfo a few years ago and didn't have much success with it. So in desperation and sheer determination to make the ********* background work, I'm thinking of not using server 2003 group policy to set backgrounds but to put a registry setting to set background for current user in a logon script, with the background stored on the computer. Is this feasible?
Simcfc73 Posted July 19, 2010 Posted July 19, 2010 Funny this, i was going to start a thread saying the same thing about w7. I have given up and may go for it next year but the amount of tweaking needed is just plain stupid... the renaming of the home folders is a pain.. the backgrounds... the start menu redirection... Hope the service pack will help with some of this stuff.
Arthur Posted July 19, 2010 Posted July 19, 2010 Hope the service pack will help with some of this stuff. It looks like it will... http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2010/07/the-complete-list-of-group-policy-hotfixs-in-windows-72008-r2-service-pack-1/ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=61924cea-83fe-46e9-96d8-027ae59ddc11
PEO Posted July 20, 2010 Posted July 20, 2010 It would be great if a guide for migrating over to 7 for server, profiles, and scripts was floating around
3s-gtech Posted July 20, 2010 Posted July 20, 2010 I am pretty much there with my students' policies for Windows 7, and PC policies. When I inititially joined a Win7 Pro machine to the domain, it wouldn't log on as a domain user. This was due to our kix scripts we use for setting printers, which I have now ditched in favour of GPP. My advice is to copy your existing settings for the relevant GP to a new policy, then start stripping out anything that can be a problem, such as scripts, then adding and tweaking settings as you go along, rather than starting from scratch. I then built a new .v2 mandatory profile from the completed user, and touch wood it seems to be okay, with decent logon times, no libraries, etc. I am getting the renamed home folders issue, but if you check the 'filename' attribute in detail view in Explorer, you can see the actual name rather than the alias. 1
Silverman Posted July 20, 2010 Posted July 20, 2010 [*]Open 12223.bmp in an image editor which can modify alpha channels. I'm going to use Photoshop since I already have it installed. [*]Go to the Channels palette and toggle the visibility of the "Alpha 1" channel by clicking on the "eye" next to it. Click on the "Alpha 1" channel itself and the image should turn red. The red area is the part of the image which is masked by the alpha channel. This is where i was going wrong. Thanks!
citycopiers10 Posted July 23, 2010 Posted July 23, 2010 I'm having same issues here... Does it really work? __________________________ Used Copier
DrCheese Posted July 28, 2010 Posted July 28, 2010 Only thing about modifying the authui.dll is that it gets replaced whenever MS patch it. It's already a different version on the SP1 beta, so you'll have to update it whenever MS does as it'll be overwritten. Replacing it via startup script will be a pain. Nice thing about the old MSgina.dll way of doing things was that you could specify a different .dll to load, so patches wouldn't affect it so much. You'd still want to update it if MS ever released a critical update for it, but it wouldn't go back to the original one in the meantime
Gatt Posted August 5, 2010 Posted August 5, 2010 The reason it may not work is due to the fact that the 12223 bitmap in AuthUI.dll has an alpha channel which covers the middle of the frame. Unless you edit this alpha channel to exclude your logo, it will not be shown at all. This is what I did to get it working... Copy authui.dll from your Windows\System32 folder to your desktop. Open the copy of authui.dll you just made in Resource Hacker. Find bitmap 12223, right-click 1033 (you will need to double-click the 12223 folder to see this) and select "Save [bitmap : 12223 : 1033]...". When the Save As dialog box appears, type "12223.bmp" in the filename box and save it to your desktop. Open 12223.bmp in an image editor which can modify alpha channels. I'm going to use Photoshop since I already have it installed. Go to the Channels palette and toggle the visibility of the "Alpha 1" channel by clicking on the "eye" next to it. Click on the "Alpha 1" channel itself and the image should turn red. The red area is the part of the image which is masked by the alpha channel. Use the rectangular marquee selection tool and/or the eraser tool to remove the red area covering the centre of the frame (where you logo will go). Pay special attention to the round corners. [/url] Next, click on the RGB channel and switch back to the Layers palette. Paste your school logo into the centre of the frame. It should be a maximum of 124x124 pixels in size if you want it to be within the frame border (or 126x126 pixels if you don't care). You should end up with something like this... Save the changes you have made to the bitmap image (File » Save) and then close Photoshop. In Resource Hacker, find bitmap 12223 again, right-click 1033 and select "Replace Resource...". In the replace bitmap dialog box, click the "Open file with new bitmap..." button, choose the 12223.bmp image you modified and then click the Replace button. Save the authui.dll (File » Save) and then close Resource Hacker. Take ownership of the original authui.dll file in the Windows\System32 folder (click here for an easy way to do this), rename it to authui.dll.bak and copy the new version saved on your desktop into this folder. You will need Administrator rights to do this. Next, configure Windows so that it doesn't display the username of the last person who logged on. You can do this via RegEdit (How to Clear and Don’t Display Last User Name who Logged In On Windows Logon Screen » My Digital Life) or Group Policy (Interactive logon: Do not display last user name: Security Configuration Editor). Restart the computer and you should end up with a logon screen which displays your school logo. Ok, depsite my reservations rgarding teh EULA, I have attempted to do this as described above, I have completed all the steps only for it not to work, all I get is the blank box. I have checked, rechecked and triple checked, even recreating from scratch, but to no avail...
Arthur Posted August 7, 2010 Posted August 7, 2010 Are you trying this on a 64-bit version of Windows 7?
kearton Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 Ok, depsite my reservations rgarding teh EULA, I have attempted to do this as described above, I have completed all the steps only for it not to work, all I get is the blank box. I have checked, rechecked and triple checked, even recreating from scratch, but to no avail... I'm getting a blank box too Are you trying this on a 64-bit version of Windows 7? 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise
andalus Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 (edited) I can confirm this works fine on windows 7 enterprise 32bit for me. Has anyone got this working via group policy? The dll is owned by trustedinstaller so I think simply defining a group policy to delete or to over write the original does workn't (at least for me). I get the blank box until i manually delete authui.dll and then allow the group policy to copy across the modified version. So I assume the policy is getting a access denied msg when it trys to over right the file. It Would be nice to have this all done via GPO's. Any ideas? Edited February 17, 2011 by andalus
hfnistelrooy Posted September 8, 2011 Posted September 8, 2011 I have just tried this with the school logo and will create a package to send out, will be doing some testing before I decide to put it across the whole network.
garethEds Posted September 9, 2011 Author Posted September 9, 2011 Yes indeed I've given up bothering to get Windows 7 onto our network. I'll just wait until the LEA get things sorted and push it through. For now I'll stick with XP and getting Office 2007 out there. We will go 2010 eventually but I think I'll wait until Windows 7 for that. So why have I come to this decision? Simply because I have not the time to mess about with things that don't work. I don't have the time to find workarounds simply because the mapped drives will not appear for admin users or to fix the black background issue. Okay I've done these but my latest bugbear is with a profile... We've created the profile as per instructions - but for some reason drives do not get mapped to a profile that has already been copied over to the local machine. We use mandatory. When the user logs on for the first time they pick up everything, but when they log on a second time - they get nothing! Delete their profile and it all works again until they log on again... What else.... security groups. I cannot get my security groups to work for some reason. We have three security groups staff/pupils and admin. I want Background 1 for Admin and Background 2 for staff - do they work? Nope not a chance. If B1 get's set then it doesn't B2 doesn't appear for staff. I need to spend time on this but fancied a rant. Sorry everyone. Back to normal now, I'll resume my testing tomorrow. [Edit - are there any schools on the M4 corridor before Bristol (in Wales then) that are running Windows 7 on a 2003 domain that I could come and see?] Gareth As I started this thread I thought I would revisit it and say how we are getting on. At the end of last term the LEA announced it would be supporting Windows 7 SP1 in an official capacity from 1 September. They deemed it stable enough to put onto the LEA wide WAN. We had been messing and reporting back and one of the support guys there was doing some excellent work. So the weeks leading up to the holidays we played with MDT2010 and the technician @rbendle and I worked on getting a deployment in place ready for sending it out to certain rooms over the Summer. The main worry being the LEA were supporting W7Pro only and we were running Enterprise. Also the LEA didn't have a KMS server - but we did. We now have the only KMS server on the LEA network. Will be interesting to see what happens when other schools need one! We were happy with our image and got Office 2010 on there with a lot of other stuff. Driver provisioning all worked and we were happy. So @rbendle over a two week period installed W7Ent in 3 rooms. We then tested it when the kids came back and have not seen any issues. Of course we have tweaked during the week but are happy with it. Between now and XMas we aim to get the whole school transferred over. There we are. All done. Gareth 1
hfnistelrooy Posted September 13, 2011 Posted September 13, 2011 Has anyone been able to get the logo bit working as a package or is there another way that I can assign it to all windows 7 workstations?
snootalope Posted August 6, 2012 Posted August 6, 2012 (edited) Arthur, I know this post is pretty old at this point, but I'm hoping you or someone can maybe help me out here. I've followed your steps for editing the 12223.bmp to T probably 30 times now and I can not get this to work. No matter what I try, I get nothing but a black screen when I replace the original authui.dll with the modified one. I even downloaded a 30 day trial of Photophop just so I could follow your instructions exactly as you've stated. One thing here, I'm trying to do this on Windows 2008 R2 which appears to be very similar if not exactly the same when it comes to the authui.dll. I believe at one point I made one bitmap that showed our company logo but it was behind one of the layers and didn't look good at all. I can't even get another made like that as it wasn't right so I just deleted it. It's like to matter what I do, if I cut a piece of the Alpha Layer out, I see nothing but a black screen.. I would greatly appreciate your, or anyone else's, advice here. I've been trying to make this work for three days now!! This is actually a Citrix XenApp server, that's why I'm using 2008 R2. Edited August 6, 2012 by snootalope
wesleyw Posted August 6, 2012 Posted August 6, 2012 Well the background is easy enough: How To Change Windows 7 Logon Screen or Download Windows 7 Logon Screen Changer Now Resource Tuner 1.99 R6: Download The Best Resource Editor. Search and replace icons and text. Icon edit. can be used to hack the file instead for the user logo account picture and this User Logon Display Picture - Set Default for All Users - Vista Forums should work. Wes
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