I'm looking for a way to temporarily disable ctrl+alt+del on Windows XP using the win32 api. (Acutally I'm trying to disable keyboard input entirely, but I've managed to intercept everything except ctrl+alt+del). I'm not even sure if this is possible in Windows XP, as everything that comes up in google seems to work only on 95/98, but I thought I'd ask here before giving up.
I'm fairly sure it's not easy. One of the threads that came up from a quick board search:
http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showt...t=ctrl+alt+del
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Try this it's a little way down the page.
Why would you want to delete Ctrl+Alt+Delete??
> I'm looking for a way to temporarily disable ctrl+alt+del on Windows XP using the win32 api
Are you going to tell the user that you're going to do it?
Why not just a popup asking the user not to do it, and stating why they shouldn't?
Disabling the last remaining route to get some control back over some errant process seems unwise to me.
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Disabling CTRL+ALT+DEL can be necercary in some cases for example in a program that is designed to be the only thing the user can use on a public computer.
IMO, setting up good security would be better than disabling ctrl+alt+del (or any escape sequence for that matter)
hell, if I'd been working at a public computer and I needed to restart it (and had no access to ctrl+alt+delete)... even if I worked there... I'd just yank the plug if something went wrong, and we all know ctrl+alt+delete'ing your way to a reboot is better than flipping the switch
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Is it even possible with WinXP to disable ctrl+alt+del? I've noticed that in Windows 98 I Ctrl+Alt+Del has no effect in some games where I can't even use Alt+Tab, but I've never seen that Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work in WinXP...
Try pressing it when your computer is locked.
What do you mean by locked?
Windows Key + L will lock the workstation. If you press CTRL+ALT+DEL at this point it won't work to prevent people bypassing this screen.
This is probably a built-in thing in Windows so you can't do it yourself. You can't do anything in your programs that Windows can.
How it works is briefly described in the link I posted. CTRL+ALT+DEL causes a function in a dll to be called you can provide your own dll and a do nothing function.
This might help you.
In XP, you can have multiple desktops. The Winlogon desktop is one of them and is special in a way that both logon and lock functions are running there. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del is switching you to this desktop, which is why pressing it while in this desktop ( locked/ login screen ) will not switch desktops as usual.
Have you ever wanted to kill a CPU hogging task and cursed XP because you can switch to that desktop and it's running fine, but the taskmanager you need to kill the process will open in your original desktop and will be slow and/or unresponsive ? You can start processes in other desktops. While starting a taskmanager in the WinLogOn desktop is probably a barn-sized security hole, it's possible and very comfortable to work with
hth
-nv
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