RU003: Retaining explorer view-settings with UPR’s

From the Fun-With-User-Preferences-dept. By now, you may have worked with the User Preferences (UPR’s) in PowerFuse 2008. If not, don’t worry – here’s a brief recap of what they are: User Preferences is essentially RES’s implementation of what used to be know in the business as Hybrid Profiles or Flex. They will let you carry settings across multiple computing platforms (laptops, workstations, ts, etc), regardless of profiles and Windows OS flavor. It’s all well to have containers to retain settings in, but times again, the real issue is knowing what to store in them in the first place. This technote will show you a good example on what to use UP’s for. Buildingblock included!

The idea with User Preferences, is to use a mandatory profile for the users and combine it with some nifty storage and retreival. What happens is that settings (files/folders in the profile and/or hkcu registry settings) are scooped up just before logoff, stored in the user’s homedrive and then re-applied once the user logs in again some other place.

So – the name of the game is obviously to catch the relevant things to store in the User Preferences. Save for the obvious things such as the Favorites, Cookies etc folders in the profile, there are other things which may be a bit obscure. One of these is the explorer settings for views. For example, every time I start up an new user account somewhere I have to deal with the default way which Microsoft thinks my folder views should be. Okay, I know, I know – 100 monkeys in a focus group, hopped up on crack can’t be wrong. Never mind. If you change it, you would as a user expect the view state to remain the way you left it.

To make sure that the user changes in the Explorer view settings are saved configure the following items:

Create the following registry key in the RES PowerFuse > Powerlaunch > User Registry:

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam]
Value Name: (Default)
Data Type: REG_SZ (String Value)
Value Data: %computername%

This value needs to change every time a user hits a new computer as these settings are otherwise bound to each computer! The above reghack will take care of this.

After that, create the following settings in the RES PowerFuse User Preferences:

Registry Tree: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags
Registry Tree: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\BagMRU
Registry Value: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams -> Settings

If the user changes the Explorer view settings, this will be saved in the User Preferences. The next time the user logs on to a computer, the settings will be loaded. Below is a buildingblock which will help you implement these UP’s + the mentioned PowerLaunch setting. Also,  a sample regfile, which you can try and import into PowerLaunch, UserRegistry, should remove the training wheels on the Windows XP explorer. Note the mentioned regfile has not been fully tested in all situations, so please take proper precautions.

Buildingblock for retaining explorer view settings:

PowerLaunch Regfile for setting default view settings (rename to .reg after dl):

Thanks to Paulina and Martin for digging up the info

/Max

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