Changing the Start Button


Tweak 1 - Change the Start button. 9 steps, Average difficulty.

Concept: The whole taskbar is in the system process explorer.exe, and we need to change it.
But it cannot be a straightforward change; instead, we need to duplicate it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This changes all start buttons for all users, so don't do this if it isn't yours.

Step 1: To be safe, make a backup of explorer.exe from C:\Windows to your desktop.
Step 2: Rename the copy on your desktop to explorercopy.exe.
Step 3: Using your decompiler, decompile explorercopy.exe, click the resource viewer button and choose String#37 or if it's not named string#37, for other decompilers, search for the one with the "start" text in it.
Step 4: After choosing string#37, edit it. Rename the "start" word with anything else you want.
Step 5: Save the changes, and copy it to C:\Windows.
Step 6: Open the Registry Editor.
Step 7: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT
\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
Step 8: Edit the key string "Shell", and replace explorer.exe with explorercopy.exe.
Step 9: Restart your computer.