Showing your logon script on Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7

Windows Vista and newer use a "Welcome" screen that hides your logon script. By default it only gets visible, if the execution takes more than 30 seconds. This means that our prelogon script is not visible on these clients, unless execution takes more than 30 seconds. On this page, we will go through how to make it visible.

First you have to decide whether or not you actually want it to be visible. If you just connect simple shares and you don't like the splash screen, you can just leave it as it is. Then it is only visible on systems older than Vista. However, if you use more advanced features, you will probably want it visible. Let's say you want to backup the users documents to their network drive with the syncdir command before the explorer starts, then you need to show the user the progress window that the syncdir command makes.

Making logon script visible

How to get rid of the "Welcome" screen

You may have noticed that by default Windows Vista/7/2008 shows a completely black background when the "Welcome" screen stops. This is gone with FastTrack logon! It uses the user's wallpaper as the background during login, so you will never see this black screen again.

Assuming you actually want to show your logon script, we need to set a registry key. This is not possible to do per-user on Windows 7, which is why FastTrack logon cannot set it for you. New in Windows 7 is that all policy keys in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive are no longer writable by the user, so we have set it with group polices. Follow this simple procedure:
  • Download this Welcome Screen Policy file and place it in your %windir%/inf folder on your domain controller
  • Open your group policies.
  • On Windows 2003: Select User Configuration->Administrative Templates (see screenshot further down).
  • On Windows 2008: Select User Configuration->Policies->Administrative Templates (see screenshot further down).
  • Right-click the selected "Administrative Templates" item and select "Add/Remove Templates".
  • Click "Add" Button and select the "CustomWelcomeScreen.adm" you just downloaded.
  • Your new policy will appear under "Logon Welcome Screen" under Administrative Templates item. On Windows 2008, the new folder is located under a folder named "Classic Administrative Templates (ADM)". Screenshots of both are available further down.
  • Select "Disable Welcome Screen" and select "Enable" as shown below.
  • Click "OK" - your clients will now show your prelogon script.

Windows 2008 Domain Controller
Group policy (GPO) adm file for Windows 7 welcome screen (Windows 2008)


Windows 2003 Domain Controller
Group policy (GPO) adm file for Windows 7 welcome screen (Windows 2003)

You can freely enable and disable it to show or hide you logon script. All it essentially does is writing a DWORD 0 to SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. If you have another preferred way of setting this value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, you can do it that way, but be aware that neither key is writable on Windows 7 in the users' context.

If you are not familiar with FastTrack based logon scripts, please refer to this page for more information.

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Rating: 5 out of 5

"Use this as a replacement for VBScript and PowerShell"

"It's easy to include attractive GUI elements in FastTrack scripts, beyond the basic dialog boxes and text input that VBScript offers ... Another powerful feature is the ability to distribute scripts as Windows Installer (.msi) or standard .exe files. Although interesting in its own right, this ability results in a much more intriguing capability: to repackage -- or wrap -- software installers as .msi files without using snapshots. If you've ever created an .msi installer file from before-and-after system snapshots, for use with a software distribution system such as Group Policy or SCCM, then you know how hit-and-miss the results can be."

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Rating: 8 out of 10

"Faster than the rest"

"We found the FastTrack syntax to be more transparent and easier to learn than Microsoft's PowerShell – the editor in particular provided good support in this regard. the Script Editor offers a large number of options from the command set through to simple output of graphical elements, which cannot be achieved at all with PowerShell or other solutions or only with a significantly greater level of effort."

"Anyone wanting to tackle the many hurdles in everyday admin and especially anyone for whom logon scripts and client automation is a priority will benefit from the variety of functions offered by FastTrack."

Review in English      Review in German