I have read this thread and a lot of people have said that if you have the registry entry to shell into your front-end, when you run explorer.exe, it only brings up the windows explorer window, not the entire GUI. After playing around with it for an hour, I found that if you boot into your front-end and then edit the registry entry in .....winlogon\shell and enter 'explorer.exe', then run explorer.exe, the full XP GUI will pop up, not just a windows explorer window.
Because I have programed my own front end in VB.NET, I can write code into it to change the registry entry.
What I do first when my front-end loads is change the registry entry to shell explorer.exe
When I click the exit button, it shells explorer.exe, then re-writes the registry entry to shell my front-end, then ends the front-end:
In the main form load_Load:
'-----------------------------
Dim WSH
WSH = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WSH.RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsof t\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell", "explorer.exe")
'-----------------------------
In the 'exit' button:
'-----------------------------
Shell("explorer.exe")
Dim WSH
WSH = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WSH.RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsof t\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell", My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\Vive.exe")
End
'-----------------------------
Vive.exe is the front-end executable.
This seems to work fine, hope this helps some people
