Startup BEFORE Windows or Explorer starts!

[Rish]

I have made a little simple program in VB. Basically it loads, shows a image, stays visible for 2 seconds then unloads itself. A splash screen.

I would like this to appear BEFORE windows (i.e. explorer.exe) starts.
So using VB to edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\RUN is no good, neither is editing WIN.INI or SYSTEM.INI or adding a link in the System Startup folder (C:\WINDOWS\STARTUP).

Anyone got any ideas? It's possible because some programs do this and Norton Antivirus is an example. Thanks.

Rish

 

[jmarler]

Both the startup folder and RUN keys in the registry run once windows is started. If you are running your application on WINNT or Win2k, you may want to look at creating a service using the NTSRV.OCX. This OCX is a free download and it will allow you to create NT services from Visual Basic applications. These services will always startup when Windows starts up (before the explorer starts). You can find more information on it at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnolectrl/html/msdn_ntsrvocx.asp.

- Jeff Marler B-)