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Comment by Ciantic | Hacker News Reader

I know it must be frustrating from Microsoft's standpoint, but those are needed because they keep changing things. Start All Back is one very popular explorer.exe patch that makes the Windows 11 taskbar function a lot like Windows 10. For one thing, it allows you to move the taskbar again.

I've also made an explorer.exe in-memory patch to disable flashing taskbar buttons in Windows 10, it injected itself to WndProc and set the specific message to zero. In Windows 11 it's now a setting, so I don't need that anymore.

Now I'm investigating an explorer.exe patch for Windows 11 to speed up wallpaper animations. Which cannot be configured at the moment, there is only one setting to turn off all animations but no setting to speed up the wallpaper fade in animation.

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> flashing taskbar buttons

Oh geez these are annoying! I've spent hours trying to find a setting to disable the flashing taskbar on the Teams client on my corporate issued Win10 laptop. The best I've found is to keep the Teams client minimized in tray just to avoid this behavior.

It boggles my mind there's no way to disable this feature that is so distracting it almost makes working impossible whenever I forget to kill the Teams client window. And really goes to show why people need to resort to these hacks.

I am glad someone else agrees. It's absolutely horrible!

> For one thing, it allows you to move the taskbar again.

But but... think of their support costs if people accidentally move the taskbar!

They have to remove your options or they'll starve!

I've literally spent over 30 minutes on a support call with someone who had accidentally moved and resized their taskbar.

All I could get out of the user was "half the screen is grey".

I quickly figured out it was probably the taskbar, and I tried asking if it was the top or bottom half, or left or right. "Half" was the reply...

After a lot of attempts and little progress, I made a breakthrough by asking in which corner the clock was. "Bottom left", aha! And with that I managed to guide the user to dragging the taskbar back and resizing it properly.

Granted this was back in Windows 98 where the taskbar wasn't locked, so was rather easy to do, it was probably their first PC and they were non-native so language barrier.

Are you the original? This story is very old :)

Hah, not quite that bad :P

Every time I go to click "Lock the Taskbar" a Clash song boogies into my head. Such an earworm! I believe they've finally renamed that option, though.

It's Lock El Taskbar now .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Sg9H2T_TQ

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/arts/music/shock-the-casb...

Wallpapers can be animated? This is like learning my car can count butterflies. I wonder why such a feature exists but also now feel obligated to hook VLC into the wallpaper function so i can play movies underneath all my other work. Can wallpapers have sound?

> speed up wallpaper animations

Sounds like the fade-in between images when you choose a folder with files to set one as wallpaper every 5/10/15 minutes

That is the same animation, but it is also triggered if you have chosen a different wallpaper per virtual desktop. It animates the background change when switching desktops, and the animation feels like it lasts around 500ms. I wouldn't mind a quick animation but the default is too slow.

There was a time when we thought wallpapers should be entire web pages! That didn't go so well

Now, browsers have themes and wallpapers, so it's customisation all the way down.

This winter, Edge introduced interactive wallpapers. There were little buttons you could press to put a layer of frost on everything, or make snow fall. I couldn't make enough snow fall to obliterate the clickbait MSNBC headlines.

> I know it must be frustrating from Microsoft's standpoint

no sympathy. Chen seems a little irritated (as he should be) at the situation, but he's still missing (or purposely not stating) the real point. the correct response is alluded to by a couple folks in the comments section. i'll be more explicit:

- if microsoft was paying attention, it would simply add the functionality these 3rd party hacky extensions were adding, obviating the need for that extension at all. Like adding a setting for the flashing taskbar buttons you mentioned.

- failing that, simply allow some of those "internal" functions as a public extension points

the fact that a market for such egregious hacks implies significant demand for something.

gad, explorer and windows UI is such a dumpster fire. you don't even need to do any kind of fancy market research, just look at what the most popular extensions are doing to patch over deficiencies and them fix them!

Do you have to turn off all system file modification detection to do these hacks? Sounds risky.

That is the weird part. My explorer.exe patch to disable flashing taskbar buttons was functioning with Microsoft Defender turned on for the whole lifetime of Windows 10 I used it. I didn't even need a UAC prompt to patch the memory. Nothing detects it, even though it goes and adds assembly instructions to three locations in the memory with WriteProcessMemory etc. It's not working by injecting DLL, it just modifies the running explorer.exe process memory so it will not modify files.

You can see the code here: https://github.com/Ciantic/DisableFlashingTaskbarButtons/tre... (there was also C version but I changed it to AHK)

Just curious, why AHK over C? Easier for users to run themselves?

I guess the C version was flagged by defender eventually? Seems to happen at some point with unsigned programs that aren't super popular these days. Using VB6 seems to be a safe bet to end up in defender quarantine. I guess because it was still used for malware a decade ago.

These are not applied on disk, they're injected at runtime. Just open the process and write to its memory directly.

In that case, DEP would be the system preventing self-modifying code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable-space_protection#Wi...

DEP does nothing to prevent OpenProcess() and WriteProcessMemory() from working or prevent applications from loading a dll which reaches into the main process's image to patch it. DEP tries to prevent exploitation from taking place within a single process by ensuring say, a buffer overflow can't just call the value you loaded into your webpage, not running software tampering with the memory of other running software using APIs which allow for the purpose.

Even if the page is marked as non-writable, execute only, you can pause the process, change the permissions and resume it or do it at image load time without issue.

Windows applications using the old/standard win32 api don't have sandboxing between them at all and any application is free to tamper with any other to an almost limitless extent. It's incredibly powerful, in both good and bad ways.

Certain advanced firewall tools with IDS style features can hook these calls and notify you when an application is attempting to do something like this.

Most troubleshooting involves defeating virus checking and opening up the firewall. It's right up there with clearing your cookies and restarting the machine. It's in all the scripts. Totally routine. Nothing to worry about.

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