Taming the Logon Screen

[PiqueABoo]

What's the consensus, the state of the art for the Logon Screen in a school/corporate scenario (as opposed to the evil-hackery you might do on a personal machine)? What did you settle on + why?

 

Picture Frame: The only good reason for that inherently ugly item appears to be that from a distance you can tell whether it is locked (=picture) or awaiting a logon (=empty frame). For me desktop locking is disabled for kids, so the picture frame is redundant. You can hack some XML in the right DLL to give the frame a zero height to disappear it, but is there a less icky way?

 

Background Image: No-brainer described with varying accuracy on a 1,000,001 blogs... put in ..\oobe\... blah blah blah ..

 

Dynamic Info on Background. BGInfo followed by any little command line BMP to JPG convertor almost does the trick same as on XP.. the trouble is it loads the background before BGInfo has run during the current boot, so if you've got any dynamic stuff on there e.g. IP address(es), they will be one boot behind and if it's a laptop wandering between school home will likely be wrong quite a lot. I also can't persuade this to work with any kind of background picture. [Note: BGInfo on user *desktops* is fine for me]

 

I note RM have an app running on the CC4 logon screen (their "banner" across the top). Haven't looked so I'm not sure whether that's via a) a psuedo-credentials provider, b) running out of a slightly naughty service, c) perhaps something else that MS told them. I've played with the naughty service thing, but that feels too icky i.e. adds overheads/complexity. Does anyone bother much with this kind of thing now now?

Edited July 12, 2012 by PiqueABoo

[localzuk]

We've gone with option 2 as it is simple and easy to change if we want to.

[sonofsanta]

I just did option 2 in the end; I don't want to muck about with DLLs to get rid of the frame, and any attempt to burn a logo onto the background at the appropriate x,y ends up making the Ctrl-Alt-Del message unreadable. In the end I figured that people won't be looking at the frame very much anyway so wasn't worth the time investment; when no-one is logged in it will show the CAD message, and once they're logged in (a few seconds of typing) it's not an issue.

 

Keeping the bginfo stuff in the corner would be really handy, mind; I know it'll still run on login but it'd be nice to quickly see what IP (therefore VLAN) a machine is in without logging in.