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Windows XP OEM Customized Login Screen

ShadowProphetShadowProphet
edited May 2015 in Software
My father has an old HP Pavilion dv-something, and he recently got a Pavilion 23 to replace it, handing the old piece of crap down to me. It has Windows XP, and when I booted it up, I noticed a login screen with black top and bottom banners, instead of blue, and the users were listed in the lower-right corner instead of the left of a horizontal line. In the background was a picture of a dragon, and the shut down option in the bottom-left said "Kill the Beast". I have never seen anything like this, and as far as my knowledge goes, you cannot do this on retail XP. I logged in and could not find any option to change this in the control panel, and then I got to thinking that maybe this was a feature specific to OEM installers of XP that allowed you to customize your login screen on first boot or during setup. Is this true, and if so, is there any way I can do this on other computers without an OEM cd?

Comments

  • TCPMetaTCPMeta
    Theres a old program called Winblinds. It adds eye candy to Windows. Maybe that did it.
  • ShadowProphetShadowProphet
    I've used that program, but it has a glitch where if you get the password wrong, the "use password reset disk" link is not blue and is just text surrounded by a shortcode. Also, things do not blend in well with each other on the skins used by that program, making them all look very amateur. This login screen has neither of those errors, and I recently found another HP desktop that has the same thing, but with a picture of a beach in the background, so I am beginning to believe it is some HP program.
  • BlueSunBlueSun
    It's likely a third party tool. Look at the list of installed programs, you'll probably find it listed there.

    I know Windows 7 has a built in option to customize the logon background by enabling a registry key / GPO setting (GPO is preferred, if you just do the registry key, it can be overridden) and many OEMs take advantage of that.
  • 02k-guy02k-guy
    Visual resources wre in:

    In XP \System32\LogonUI.exe

    Also, NTOSKRNL.EXE

    There were tools to do this specifically, or (in the beginning) we used Resource Hacker or PE Explorer.
  • JoshJosh
    Reshack was the shiz. The fun part was building the files back into the format that allowed them to be slipstreamed into the Windows OS installer.
  • 02k-guy02k-guy
    Yup. Res hack was amazing for a free tool(and Borland Resource Workshop). In another thread its asked why XP was so popular. Well part of it was the infinite ability to customize the visuals.
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