This is a bit off topic, but members of this forum have directed me to many additional applications to add in to my now highly reduced Win2k. These include myuninst, mpui, win32pad, etc.

I just thought I would mention a nice open source app that I just found that gives the taskbar a needed boost. It is a WindowBlinds sort of thing called TClock3 by WildBill. If you are interested, have a look:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=64148&st=0

I'm really interested in that, but since every time it refreshes it disconnects from the taskbar and leaves a junk process running, apparently I'm destined for windows greyness.

Hope it works for everyone else.

This will keep your system running nice and light by replacing the explorer shell. It uses far less resources, doesn't crash and can be configured tons of various ways. Personally, I like the multiple desktop feature.

Don't forget about Litestep. It is the grand-daddy of them all and has recently experienced a development revival.

/me wonders about HFSLIPing a replacement shell....hmmmm...

Tain, did you ever try fdv's files and doing hfexpert\win\firefox? Remove the few readme files with spaces in the filenames of the firefox folder. You'd be missing a shortcut though. I tried it once and I believe it worked.... and they said you could never slipstream firefox. They said you could never remove IE too. That would be cool by topping it off by slipstreaming an alternate shell. Nice sweet solution.

[squeeto, sorry for hijacking]

TommyP
Do you have a screenshot and does it HFSLIP? - Notice my casual verbing of HFSLIP

TAiN
I tried Litestep and it was too buggy for me at the time and that was not a good thing considering I was just getting into HFSLIP and FDV's files.


No problem, actually good 'cause I wanted to know how to do this with Opera anyway

And since we are deviating a little off topic, anyone know what happened to Oleg_II? Not like him to stay out of the mix for so long.

Don't forget GeoShell.

I am currently using Silence of the Foxes. Works great for me. Is there anyone seriously interested in an alternate shell for HFSLIP? I would be willing to work on a Litestep silent installer-type addon.


Yehaw! HFSLIP is now a verb!
Just Google it...
Just HFSLIP it...

on this whole alternate shell thing, i am too lazy to do the research so the various shells all allow users to move icons around the desktop now? only one did back when i was paying attention.

Icons on the desktop are an explorer.exe function. With bblean you need to configure your desktop icons yourself. Litestep was buggy for me.

Squeeto - nope, no screenshots. I did that stuff a few months back. I'll see if I have my bblean config files so I can install it and attempt to post a pic here.

Litestep has a module that replicates explorer's desktop functionality. I don't personally use it; but have loaded it in the past.

bblean sure is a thing of beauty. I wonder if anyone at their forum has already done the ground work for shell in, shell out. There must be a tonne of interdependencies.

Once you DL bblean, there is a simple batch file installer and batch file for a remover. It's really easy to do.

Shell selection is a single-key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
Shell (Reg_SZ)

No dependency.

Well maybe but I mean how nicely it plays with others.
From the bblean web site:

That's a flaw shared by most shell replacements I've tried. I attribute it more to Explorer mucking up the replacement's features, since remove explorer and problem solved.

Icons are odd in windows. Apparently updating them causes page faults, which explains the 4 million listed for me under the task manager. They ammased since I rebooted a few hours ago. And, ofcourse, there's the whole 16-colour systray icons thing that adds to my feeling that they're handled weird.

Oh, and to top it off, I'm really really tired and had to recheck this entire post several times for spelling errors. Foggy-brain also makes me think they're handled weird in windows.

With bblean, you still use explorer.exe to view files, but explorer.exe is not the shell. With the proper BBLEAN plugin and proper configuration, the systray will be there. It's manual tweaking to get it right, but it IS possible to have the systray (tested with two different systems). For some reason or another, the bblean plugin file required to have the systray isn't part of the main bblean package.

The most simple "shell selector" I ever found is Carapace:
http://www.sharpe-shell.org/content.php?content.12

Hosted on the SharpE shell site, worth a look:
http://www.sharpe-shell.org/content.php?content.9

Just for the record, it is possible to change shell on a "per user" basis:
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/849/


jaclaz

You have one shell per session.
It handles systray and some other things.
When you run litestep, you don't really run the shell. To be fully-functionnal, it has to be started by winlogon.
In fact, if you run another shell on top of explorer, it's normal that it doesn't work properly.

Perhaps I should have clarified. "Windows Explorer" (the file manager of sorts) is explorer.exe. The shell is explorer.exe. By shell, I mean this is what you see on your monitor after you log into the machine. It's the same file being used for two different things on a default windows machine. BBLEAN or any other shell replacement will still use the "Windows Explorer" part of explorer.exe, unless you change it.

Without a shell, you can't click, do or view anything, unless you have some sort of dos window to issue commands.

So the verdict? Should we look for a better explorer replacement?

Major task or simple reg entries?

I do get looks sometimes when I say that I still use 2k (actually I have XP on disk). It would be nice to have a nicer desktop. Not going to buy 2k3 also.

Squeeto - Do you mean explorer.exe the shell? or explorer.exe as the windows explorer? There are alternate shells as previously mentioned, and there are alternate windows explorers too, such as this one http://www.explorerxp.com.

Have you tested either one out?

Cubic Explorer is another promising looking file manager.

bbLean is apparently dead due to an MIA dev. Some other folks have taken up the torch and they hang out here. The latest version is buried in the thread but you can find it here. How does it compare to xoblite?

I am still a litestep man but bbLean is nice, too. litestep does use more resources, but not very much more and it is far more configurable and usable.

Your saying that my 'file manager' explorer.exe is also the shell? Micro$tuff does it again

bblean worked first time but o'so boring skin (I know there are others) and I remember checking out explorerxp from the recommendations at FDV's site. If I go with bblean, I can't see any reason to keep explorer.exe. You know if we changed enough there may no longer be any MS content at all.

That is correct.
I don't have much experience with bbLean but there were some attractive 'syles' on the right-click menu. Some were quite ugly as well. boxshots.org has a nice sample of what bbLean can do.

I'm not sure that removing explorer.exe is the best idea. Even though I use litestep and xplorer^2, having explorer.exe around comes in handy. I think it would be an interesting project to cook up a reducer/addon combo that cleans explorer and replaces the shell.

If shell selection is one reg key:



And we have viable file manager type replacement with ExploreXP


Why do we need a meddling app like explorer.exe? What else does it do, can we live without it and has anyone (and many people read this) made the attempt to at least, as you say, clean it?

Yes. Interesting project.

I like that... meddling.

I'm sure that with the proper hfcleanups and the proper hfexperts, we can get rid of explorer. Did you ever see how much memory explorer.exe uses?

That cubic explorer is pretty cool. Here's a tip for you folks. DL either (or both) explorerxp and/or cubic explorer (get the ZIP version).

Explorerxp... Install the program to get the exe file. Go to the programfiles directory and grab a copy of the explorerxp.exe file. Place it into hfexpert\win\system32.

Cubic Explorer... Unzip to a temp location. Grab the cubicexplorer.exe file and place it into hfexpert\win\system32.

Check out this link-
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=221268

Halfway through the topic, Raum says to just open Task Manager and kill the explorer.exe process.
Raum seems to be THE dude to ask about ramifications...so I did. I'll let you know what he says.

Killing it is one thing, removing it is entirely different. I can vouch that you don't need it running all the time since I haven't used it much in the past few years. However, there could be a great many things that rely on it for some reason. MS loves to integrate things (see IE) so it wouldn't surprise me if the loss of explorer.exe made other things die.

Give it a shot! Setup a fresh VM, set blackbox as your default shell, rename explorer.exe to something else, and reboot. Then test lots of things to see if anything is broken.

So set-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell (Reg_SZ) to blackbox.exe
(For now ok, later I will give it it's own folder)

copy blackbox.exe to HFEXPERT\WIN
ren explorer.exe to explorer.bak and copy to HFEXPERT\WIN

Add reduction for explorer.exe

That it?

That oughta do it. I suppose you could do an APPREPLACEMENT of blackbox.exe for explorer.exe...that would be simpler but if there are any issues it would be harder to track down. Don't forget about blackbox's config files, backgrounds, fonts, plugins, etc.

I've been busy playing with bblean (learning).
Well, I was hoping that it would work first time. But blue screen of death
It starts ok with logon but nothing after except mouse and screen.

I made shell.rem for HFCLEANUP having-
explorer.ex

added the blackbox directory to HFEXPERT\WIN

and I added to my personal .inf in HFSVPK the line-
HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon","Shell",, "%10%\blackbox\blackbox.exe"

Before I try APPREPLACEMENT, does anyone see any omission/mistake?

Did you put blackbox.exe inside HFEXPERT\WIN\blackbox?

Squeet. The reason you only had a screen with a mouse is because there was no shell (see next para). Remember, there are two things that explorer.exe does: the shell and the file manager.

I tried various ways to delete msft's explorer.exe and found a few things. You give up all context menus in the "alternate" windows explorer. This is a big minus in my book. I routinely do a right mouse click and search. This feature is gone. Right mouse click on INF files is gone too. Also, I tried swapping the shell by altering the hives, running infs and running regedits, but the explorer.exe shell still wants to load up at the first boot. So if there is no explorer.exe that acts like a shell, then you'll get a blank screen. The reg setting for the shell is getting set somewhere else, perhaps it's hardcoded in some setup exe file?

One thing that is important with slipstreaming BBLEAN is that you remove any files with spaces and removing files that have 4 character extensions. Otherwise, you'll have a bad txtsetup.sif file. I hardly think it's worth altering hfslip for this only because the shell swap doesn't seem to readily work properly. Perhaps an sfx file is better for this? I don't know.

A crazy idea that may work is to place the contents of the bblean folder into HFEXPERT\WIN and rename the BBLEAN.EXE file to explorer.exe. In other words... HFEPERT\WIN\EXPLORER.EXE. I haven't tried this though and I'm not sure how bblean would act if it had a different exe filename. Anyone want to test it?

I'll try tonight. BTW, without explorer, how do I install my next inf file? Will I also lose the right click Merge on .reg files?

a lifetime ago, i did exactly this. i booted up my pc with a DOS disk. i deleted explorer.exe (windows 2000) and copied over an alternative shell from the D:\ drive, renaming the alternate shell explorer.exe. i know it's not so useful if i can't recall the shell or the error, but the gist of my post is this: don't go unwrapping everything that wears a pretty ribbon.

NO! Wait! that's not it. uh, the gist is this: it won't work. windows will try to run the new explorer and will just crash. just sayin'.

edit: see, the thing is, with those context menus, that stuff is in MS's explorer.exe. you have to add that stuff to the registry if you want it restored in an alternate shell with explorer.exe shut off (ctrl alt del, as has been mentioned) but when explorer is running again, you get two of each item in the context menu. in other words, with explorer off and the "install" right click context menu choice in the registry, you will be able to keep the menu item, but when explorer is on, you'll have two "install" items in that menu. i tried that, too...

the problem chiefly is that MS doesn't document the hooks in explorer or shell32. another bummer? the WINE project has rewritten a lot of DLLs, but substitutiing them doesn't work, either. MSHTML.DLL, from the WINE project, doesn't do a thing. closest candidate for an explorer replacement with MS functionality? it misses the mark, but explorer from the ReactOS Project. that guy is one smart cookie, having made a binary compatable microsoft OS replacement that can interchange some system binaries with windows.

So I guess it's pointless to let you know that it didn't work.

The next best then would be a blackbox.exe -install in the winnt.sif [GuiRunOnce]?

Or, just have a .reg or .inf that changes HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\shell to %ProgramFiles%\bblean\blackbox.exe

this is how I do it anyway (exept I have blackbox.exe in system32, so I only say blackbox.exe), and what blackbox.exe -install does.

If you're keeping explorer.exe for that device install phase, your best bet is to alter that registry entry with a reg file in HFSVPK. I've changed quite a few settings on my system, and aside from the recycle bin sound they all seem to apply properly.

If you really want to clean things up after, log all useless junk into a cleaner batch file and stick it on the desktop. Ahh...I'm too crude.

Sorry, Tomcat76. I missed your post.
Yes, but as folk say, it won't make a difference.

Kramy
So if I leave my original reg entry:

but leave out my shell.rem it will install properly and run the blackbox shell?

I'll try tonight.

No, didn't work, but I notice that my reg entry didn't take. If I install my inf file inside the virtual box, I do get blackbox after I log back in.

TommyP
Any ideas how to make this stick? If it does go in, and before explorer is needed, I may still be able to include the explorer.exe reduction.

The background pic is probably being displayed without the expressed permission of the artist. But you know I have been downloading dozens of styles and tweaking this and that and it just happens to be what I have on the desktop.

I have no idea on how to make it stick (see my post #36 of this thread). Maybe a cmdlines command? Cmdlines happens after svcpack.

TommyP
Thanks for the bblean suggestion. I have been playing with it for a while and it will be HFSlipped into my source. I like the look. Explorer will just have to learn to co-exist.

Squeeto, For the community's info, can you tell us what your commit & thread usage is when using bblean? Close your browser before running this test. Thanks!