Hideshell

[Todd H]

I've done a search but couldn't find anything.  Anybody know where I can download the hideshell.exe program that hides the windows shell?  Since I've reinstalled XP it's the only program I can't seem to locate.  Thanks.

[Todd H]

Well, I've searched left and right and googled until I can't google anymore and have come up empty.  The first time I heard about it was at http://www.geocities.com/drjayd177/DrJsArcade4.html.  It was a cool little program in visual basic I believe that hid the XP shell.  Then when my hard drive died on me, I lost a lot of my data, including hideshell.  I thought someone here mentioned it once as well and was hoping maybe one of the members here had a copy.  If I can't find it, is there another way to hide the shell in XP?

[ultrastyle]

I don't know if this works on XP, but in the "old" days you could set the shell = to anything you wanted and that was the only program that would run. If you had a 98 machine you could set the shell= in win.ini or system.ini (whichever it's in) to any .exe. like calc, or notepad, or mame32...
it defaults to explorer.exe but of course you'd have no way to run anything else unless you set it back to what it used to say, and then rebooted.

BTW this was the best trick I knew on a windows 98 machine, set the shell = *explorer.exe instead of explorer.exe and windows would boot to a desktop, and then say you must re-install windows and then shut down by itself. Instant heart attack for your friend. oh how we used to laugh.
 Chris

[Howard_Casto]

Still works, there are just more tricks to get it working now.....  

Google it and you'll find your answers.  

[Random24]

Here again are my directions to do this with XP:

I have posted this tutorial I wrote a few times now.  Someone may want to add it to the faq section or something.

Getting a Front-end to run as a shell in XP and start with no user intervention
You cannot do this if your computer is part of a domain. It must only be part of a workgroup.

• Create a user that will be the auto-login user. (User should have admin rights at this time)
• Configure XP to automate the logon process if your computer is not part of a domain.
• Click Start, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.
• Clear the Users must enter a username and password to use this computer check box.
• Click Apply.
• Enter the user name and pwd you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.
• Click OK again and you're all done.


• Setup your FE the way you want it.
• Open regedit and browse to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon"
• Look for a string entry called 'Shell'. If it is not there, create a string entry and name it 'Shell'. Set the value of this entry to the name and location of your Front-end. For Lazarus, the shell entry may be "C:\Lazarus\Lazarus.exe" or wherever your Lazarus executable is located. For explorer, the entry is simply "explorer.exe".
• Log out as the auto-login user and log back in as another user with administrative rights.
• Change the auto-login user to a standard user. (This way people don't have more access than you want them to have.)

I apparently forgot something in my original post.  As found here:

Disabling the blue Welcome screen and startup/shutdown messages:
Change from the default windows XP welcome screen to the older style by going to Control Panels>User Accounts>Change the way users logon or off. Deselect the "Use Welcome Screen" checkbox.
To get rid of the startup and shutdown messages via regedit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>Policies>System
If there's a DisableStatusMessages dword there, change it to 1, otherwise add it and change it to 1.

The really nice thing about this setup is that if you need to admin the box, all you have to do is logout from the autologin user and then log in as another user. As long as that other user doesn't have the shell setting changed, you will have a normal windows session.