Screensaver in Windows 2000

[Jeff Richard]

I work for an infared tracking company. I've been asked to develop a program
that auto-starts the Windows screensaver when a user of our system leaves
a designated area. I don't have a problem envoking the Windows screensaver,
nor do I have a problem under Windows 9x passing the password to the screensaver
to turn the screensaver off; however, this is not true under Windows 2000.
As soon as I try to pass Windows 2000 the screensaver password, my program
is halted, waiting for the user to supply their system login. So I tried
a different approach, I essentially wrote my own screensaver, again, I don't
have an issue in Windows 9x. Because I'm acting as if my program has control
of the OS, I don't want the users to press Ctl +Alt +Del, I found a way to
have my application not show in the running tasks list, but I don't even
want our users to see this list. Through a lot of digging on the internet
I found that you can turn Ctl +Alt +Del off, but then you have to add entries
in the registry that auto-logins the user. This would be acceptable, however,
if anything with the users network login changes, they're in trouble. Is
there a way to either 1) pass the password to the screensaver 2) turn off
the Ctl +Alt +Del in Windows 2000?

Thanks

Jeff Richard
IR Software Developer
Versus Technology, Inc.

[Don Bradner]

"Jeff Richard" <jeffr@versustech.com> wrote:

> Is
>there a way to either 1) pass the password to the screensaver 2) turn off
>the Ctl +Alt +Del in Windows 2000?

Not for the first one. The password protected screensaver on any NT-based OS
(NT/2K/XP) runs on a separate desktop precisely so that it cannot interact
with programs in the regular desktop. You are trying to defeat the very
security measures for which the OS was built. For the second one, there may be
policies you can edit to make it happen, but not API calls. You may want to
re-ask using a different subject, such as "Disable Ctrl-Alt-Del via policies?"
that might attract an admin type to answer. I do a lot of screen saver stuff,
so that's why I reacted to this subject line.




--
Don Bradner
don@arcatapet.net
MVP Visual Basic