Back in March, I wrote about how you could easily customize the background of a Windows 7 logon screen. One problem you may have run into is that lighter wallpapers affect button and text readability. To overcome this issue, Microsoft added the ability to change the active “button set” to a couple of alternatives.

 
Comparison of Windows 7 Logon UI “Button Sets” (from left to right: default, set one, set two)

To change your button set, simply jump to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI and add a DWORD value named ButtonSet. The supported integer values range from 0 to 2, with each value defined below.

• 0 – Lighter text shadows, darker (more opaque) buttons (Windows default)
• 1 – Darker text shadows, lighter (more translucent) buttons (for lighter backgrounds)
• 2 – No text shadows, opaque buttons (for darker backgrounds)

I was reading Mark Russinovich’s latest UAC article and Long Zheng’s latest scribblings and… developed quite the headache. Honestly, I’m tired of trying to sort out what UAC really is and don’t care anymore. UAC has become this gigantic undocumented blob of an idea that is explained (differently) on-demand every single time, to fit some marketing agenda du jour, and I’m sick of it. Mark jumps up and down about how UAC isn’t a security boundary and how we’re stupid for thinking such, yet Microsoft’s own sites pitch otherwise. Whatever, guys.

Here’s my million dollar question: If UAC wasn’t designed to ultimately protect us from anything, why does its icon resemble a damn shield?

Third to be touched upon is Microsoft Blackboard, a pseudo-physics game (reminiscent of The Incredible Machine and featuring graphics gaspingly similar to Crayon Physics) in which you use gestures to rotate and resize various objects to get balloons to explode from a light bulb’s hot touch. Like Rebound this game was developed by our friends at Fuel Games. As a huge bonus to those that can’t pass the first level, I’ve included the solve below.

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Digging through the technical innards of the Touch Pack games is a rather tedious and fruitless process… but for blog post series completion purposes, Blackboard is yet another Win32 application tying into the usual DirectX and PhysX APIs, requiring shader support for high fidelity, etc. What’s new here, however, is mention of a level editor. Lets hope a) it materializes and b) is as easy to use as Tinker’s editor was.

Next in the list of toys that Microsoft revealed in the new Touch Pack for Windows 7 is Rebound. Rebound, developed by Fuel Games (the peeps that brought us Tinker), is a simple pong-like game with additions such as electricity, spinning projectiles, futuristic sounds, and clumsy AI; the perfect time vampire, if you exclude Sony’s line of products. Gameplay consists of a player (or two) placing their fingers on a set of orbs to create an arc of energy, to act as a paddle. The arc’s strength and ball stopping ability is dependent on the distance between the player’s orbs. That’s the simple rundown, obligatory game-play video below. My thanks to Paul Thurrott for being patient with me.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Judging by the score and timer counters, this was initially designed for Microsoft Surface.

On the technical side, Rebound is a native Win32 application, tying into the DirectX 9, DirectX10 and PhysX APIs. The latter is interesting because you may get a little physics processing boost if you’re using a fairly recent NVIDIA GPU (Geforce 8 or higher) or if you shelled out for and installed an AGEIA PhysX Accelerator. (If you have a PhysX card lying around collecting dust, send it to me!) With regards to shaders, things are a bit gray. It’s not clear which shader model the game requires but my guess is 2. Shader model 1 is for wimps and 3 is a bit bleeding, compared to today’s typical mass-produced consumer PC. Simply put, if your machine can’t do Aero proper (with transparency), you will have issues playing Rebound. You may be able to speed things up by throwing more memory at it with DOS/4GW, however.

This afternoon, via ‘the blog’, Microsoft revealed the new Touch Pack for Windows 7 featuring six new touch-enabled applications (toys) to be installed on touch-supported hardware (at the OEM’s discretion of course). While all the toys are nice, the first to catch my eye was the photo-realistic fishy Microsoft Surface Lagoon screensaver. It features a photo realistic set of images put together to form a vivid 3D environment for the fishies to swim around and enjoy. Touching the display while the screensaver is going results in ripple formation – consistent with a finger being inserted in the water (i tested in my real aquarium) – and even draws the fish near while keeping your finger dry. Very nice!

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

On the technical side, Lagoon is an in-house XNA-powered application that utilizes GPU shader models 2 and 3 for the eye candy goodness, depending on availability and rendering performance. (This means your EeePC is out of the question.) While it supports custom backgrounds and variable amounts of fish, it does not support the creation of rich environments, placement of 3D objects, or feeding.

About a month ago, Cullen Dudas released a neat video detailing the conceptual Windows UI he’s been working on for months, shown below for those who haven’t seen it in crap wonderful Vimeo quality. While some may not agree with certain elements of the design, you should at least appreciate his detailed analysis on the decisions he made in his new white paper. Check it out, it’s worth a read on that Kindle DX you just bought.

The folks a Seven Forums shot me a note regarding the public availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate build. As mentioned by forum member 'Howdr', you can now sign up for your beta kit or simply leech the build directly using the links below.

x86 build
http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/dl/download/release/windows7/4/0/c/40c1e714-7910-4b38-9b5e-67fa522e6a44/7100.0.090421-1700_x86fre_client_en-us_retail_ultimate-grc1culfrer_en_dvd.iso

x64 build
http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/dl/download/release/windows7/e/b/5/eb58e76e-17fa-409b-855f-11fbe84d1c93/7100.0.090421-1700_x64fre_client_en-us_retail_ultimate-grc1culxfrer_en_dvd.iso

Back in February, I posted a list of applications that have the authority to automatically elevate without prompt in Windows 7. This list has been shortening over the months, with the Release Candidate build featuring the shortest list of now only 62 entries.

Notable missing entries (good thing) are rundll32.exe and mmc.exe.

• \Windows\ehome\Mcx2Prov.exe
• \Windows\System32\AdapterTroubleshooter.exe
• \Windows\System32\BitLockerWizardElev.exe
• \Windows\System32\bthudtask.exe
• \Windows\System32\chkntfs.exe
• \Windows\System32\cleanmgr.exe
• \Windows\System32\cliconfg.exe
• \Windows\System32\CompMgmtLauncher.exe
• \Windows\System32\ComputerDefaults.exe
• \Windows\System32\dccw.exe
• \Windows\System32\dcomcnfg.exe
• \Windows\System32\DeviceEject.exe
• \Windows\System32\DeviceProperties.exe
• \Windows\System32\dfrgui.exe
• \Windows\System32\djoin.exe
• \Windows\System32\eudcedit.exe
• \Windows\System32\eventvwr.exe
• \Windows\System32\FXSUNATD.exe
• \Windows\System32\hdwwiz.exe
• \Windows\System32\ieUnatt.exe
• \Windows\System32\iscsicli.exe
• \Windows\System32\iscsicpl.exe
• \Windows\System32\lpksetup.exe
• \Windows\System32\MdSched.exe
• \Windows\System32\msconfig.exe
• \Windows\System32\msdt.exe
• \Windows\System32\msra.exe
• \Windows\System32\MultiDigiMon.exe
• \Windows\System32\Netplwiz.exe
• \Windows\System32\newdev.exe
• \Windows\System32\ntprint.exe
• \Windows\System32\ocsetup.exe
• \Windows\System32\odbcad32.exe
• \Windows\System32\OptionalFeatures.exe
• \Windows\System32\perfmon.exe
• \Windows\System32\printui.exe
• \Windows\System32\rdpshell.exe
• \Windows\System32\recdisc.exe
• \Windows\System32\rrinstaller.exe
• \Windows\System32\rstrui.exe
• \Windows\System32\sdbinst.exe
• \Windows\System32\sdclt.exe
• \Windows\System32\shrpubw.exe
• \Windows\System32\slui.exe
• \Windows\System32\SndVol.exe
• \Windows\System32\spinstall.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesComputerName.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesDataExecutionPrevention.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesHardware.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesPerformance.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesProtection.exe
• \Windows\System32\SystemPropertiesRemote.exe
• \Windows\System32\taskmgr.exe
• \Windows\System32\tcmsetup.exe
• \Windows\System32\TpmInit.exe
• \Windows\System32\verifier.exe
• \Windows\System32\wisptis.exe
• \Windows\System32\wusa.exe
• \Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\bth.inf_x86_neutral_65c949576945c2a9\fsquirt.exe
• \Windows\System32\oobe\setupsqm.exe
• \Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe

Like normal people, I was never into the squeeze-every-kilobyte-out-of-my-operating-system-installs fad. It’s not a process that really yields any tangible benefit, yet people still do it -- with a tool called vLite. On Tuesday, Microsoft issued a note to users, of “v-Lited” Windows Vista SP1 installs, having issues upgrading to SP2. Their advice? Reinstall Windows with genuine media. You know, the one full of carbs. Check out the support article after the quote below.

This problem occurs because system components that are required to install Windows Vista SP2 are not present on your computer. However, a common reason for this problem is that the vLite software was used to customize the Windows Vista installation and some required system components were removed.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/968279

As mentioned in that boring overview yesterday, Windows XP Mode (XPM) utilizes some key RDP (6.1+) technologies to enable seamless virtual application use in Windows 7. More specifically, Remote Applications and Application Publishing.

For those not Terminal Services wizards, these technologies may sound new. Application Publishing enables you to “install” an application on a client machine – at least as far as the user is concerned. Shortcuts and file-type associations are set up, just as a local installation would, but when the application is invoked it’s started on a server somewhere within your infrastructure. The Remote Applications piece then kicks in and draws the client UI in a very convincing manner.

XPM eliminates the publishing step in the traditional Terminal Services model by incorporating monitoring logic within the Virtual Machine Services components installed on Windows XP for you, at first run. This component, amongst other things, monitors the (All Users) Start Menu for shortcut additions and deletions. For example, after detecting an added shortcut XPM adds the application to the Remote Applications white-list, nabs its icon, and performs some other internal house keeping tasks before passing the baton to the host operating system for addition to the Virtual Applications list in the Start Menu.

In the video below, I demonstrate just that with Internet Explorer 6.

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As shown in the video, one of the (current?) limitations with XPM (as a result of client Terminal Server licensing) is that only one user or channel can be open at any given time. This means you cannot execute Internet Explorer 6 while running maintenance tasks within the virtual machine, like installing updates from Windows Update. For the tinker tots, however, you may want to patch the Windows XP guest to allow simultaneous RDP sessions. Doing so, of course, is a violation of a few EULAs but it’s worth the gain in knowledge. It’ll be our little secret, okay?