Microsoft Windows Registry Guide, Second Edition

Customizing the Windows Logon

I'll end this chapter by showing you how to customize the logon process in Windows. The first thing I want to show you is how to customize the screen saver that Windows uses when it's displaying the Log On To Windows dialog box. There's no user interface for configuring this screen saver. However, you can change it in the key HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop. Set the value of SCRNSAVE.EXE to the name of the screen saver file that you want to use. The default value is Logon.scr, which is the logon screen saver. If you want to use the Starfield screen saver instead, set SCRNSAVE.EXE to Ssstars.scr.

The second customization is a bit more serious. Companies often want to display an acceptable usage policy when users log on to their computers. You can do that by setting the REG_SZ value LegalNoticeCaption to the caption that you want to display in the window's title bar, and the REG_SZ value LegalNoticeText to the text that you want to display in the window. Both values are in the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. For example, you can set LegalNoticeCaption to Corporate Policy and LegalNoticeText to Corporate policy prohibits the use of this computer for actual work.