Do they actually need it?

We've been thinking about replacing some of our ancient computers on wheels (COWs) over at our hospital facility with wireless Wyse devices and View virtual desktops for a few months now. The current ones are ancient mobile P4 based machines that we can't really get parts for. They're set up as locked down Windows XP desktops with very minimal rights.

Since I can't really use XP any longer and our move to Windows 7 eminent, I've been working on a special Windows 7 virtual desktop for our auto logon PCs down at the hospital when I realized that, through group policy I had locked down the users so much that the only link on the start menu was to the printers...

So I asked one of my colleagues about the start button and menu... Do the users actually need it? I mean, they really only ever use the shortcuts on the desktop, and for auto logon/locked down desktops, there's really no need for it. So I set about the task to get rid of the Windows 7 Start Button/Ballon (whatever you want to call it).

I honestly searched high and low for a quick answer to the getting rid of it like through Group Policy or a dirty reg edit or what-have-you... but all I found were posts about making Windows UI API calls that hid the button - like they did with the original XP start button. My hope for doing this the easy way quickly died. Well, after attempting to editing a C# program that didn't work (I have no idea how to write C# but programming to me is pretty logical and given a little bit of time I can usually figure out what any piece of code is actually doing) that I found on one of the bigger code sharing sites with no luck, I found a simple little program called "StartKiller" from Tordex.com. Somehow, they were able to find a way to completely hide and remove both the start button and menu in windows 7... I was floored. Not only that, but it also hides the tray icon as well! I found out that just running the program at logon through group policy wasn't enough to hide the start menu and tray icon so using some procmon magic from sysinternals, I found the registry key they use on the fly to do both. I exported the key to a reg file and using the amazing program called RegToAdm (from the NUTS program package... awesome program. I haven't found a need for the other utilities yet, but RegToAdm is fantastic) to create this custom ADM file (please note - this ADM file isn't perfect and could be better):

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLASS USER

CATEGORY "Start Killer"
KEYNAME "Software\True Software\Start Killer"

POLICY "ShowTrayIcon"
EXPLAIN "This value is either 1 or 0. Set it to 1 to show the tray icon or 0 to hide it."
PART "ShowTrayIcon"
NUMERIC
VALUENAME "ShowTrayIcon"
MIN 0
MAX 1
DEFAULT 0
END PART
END POLICY

POLICY "BlockStart"
EXPLAIN "This value is either 1 or 0. Set it to 1 to disable the start menu or 0 to enable it"
PART "BlockStart"
NUMERIC
VALUENAME "BlockStart"
MIN 0
MAX 1
DEFAULT 1
END PART
END POLICY

END CATEGORY
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, setting start killer to run at logon and adding this ADM file to the user GP gave me this


Fantastic, no start menu, no worries... just find the icon on the desktop and click it (icons removed for privacy)