change appearance of Start Menu programatically

[Tony Logan]

I'd like to set the appearance of the Start Menu in Windows XP so that any
user who logs onto the PC will see the XP Start Menu (not the Classic Start
menu). The Classic Start menu is our company default, but there are some
users we'd like to change to the XP Start menu so we can pin certain
shortcuts to it.

The closest I've been able to get is to change a bunch of registry settings,
but to get it to apply to the current user, I have to log them off and reboot
the PC, which isn't an acceptable solution. When I change the appearance
manually, obviously the change happens without me logging off/rebooting.

I found some VBscript code that opens the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties
dialog, but I haven't been able to find anything to show me how to perform
any further actions.

Is this something I can do w/ VBscript, or does anyone know of another way
to accomplish this? I'm not committed to VBscript, but started pursuing that
option since it's what I'm most familiar with. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Crash Explorer and restart it.

taskkill /im explorer.exe
explorer.exe

 

[Ron Badour]

Maybe I am not grasping your question correctly but here goes anyway. Why
don't you change the default to be the XP menu? Right click the taskbar,
properties, start menu tab.

Or. Use the classic menu and move all short cuts into the individual start
menu folder (empty out the default user and all users start menu folders)
and tailor each user folder to only contain those shortcuts you want that
user to view.

--
Regards

Ron Badour
MS MVP
Windows Desktop Experience

 

[Tony Logan]

Tried taskkill, but it doesn't work for this situation: it still prompts for
a reboot. I'm trying to apply the changes without making the user reboot the
PC.

I tried by combining the necessary reg changes to switch the menu appearance
and the a batch file w/ the taskkill command into an exe, then placing that
exe in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, then also placing
the exe in the All Users Startup folder, but in both cases the PC prompted
for a reboot before applying the changes.

 

[Tony Logan]

Hi, Ron. Your option 2 is probably closest to what I could use. I actually
wound up solving it with a VB script that uses WSH's SendKeys method, and
fire it from the registry with each user log in. That way I can have the XP
menu appear for each user on that particular PC. Sometimes a PC will only
have one user, but sometimes there will be multiple users, and we want the XP
Start Menu to appear for these users without them having to make any manual
changes themselves.

Thanks again for your advice.