IDEA: Relog

[wreckedcarzz]

Alright, I don't know if this can even be done in any programming language at all for Windows, but I figured asking can't hurt.

I am in need of a program to log me out, then automatically log me back in to Windows (Vista, specifically, but need XP support too). I would assume that the password would need to be stored somewhere - I personally don't care about encryption or anything, plain text file storage is fine for me.

Other things that would be nice...

• Hooking into Vista's little fly out shutdown/restart/etc menu thingy... whatever you call it.
• Ability to relog as a different user (or automatically do Fast User Switching and not a full Log Out, Login to different account)
• Scheduler to do this automatically

I'm hoping someone can pull this off... I "relog" a lot just to make sure changes to Windows and stuff are applied, and keep anything bad from going crazy with my RAM (*cough* Firefox *cough*). It would be really nice to not have to wait a few seconds for the Welcome Screen, enter my password and wait again. Just Relog and wait a few seconds.

-Brandon

[steeladept]

Maybe I don't quite get the details you are looking for, but I believe TweakUI can do this (of course MS didn't make one for Vista - there is a pay version called TweakVI though).  We use it at work on kiosk machines in case someone logs off or shutsdown - it automatically restarts and logs in to the kiosk user account.

Edit:  As a clarification, the pay version is by a third party and they do have a free version.  However, the free version does not appear capable of this and the premium (for pay) version appears to have the capability you are after.

Of course you could always search key by key through the entire registry and learn how to set these yourself...

[CWuestefeld]

Here's a link to the first article I found detailing how to configure this in the registry.
http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/13/

But this isn't going to help you if you're just logging off; IIRC, it only triggers as the system is booting.

On the other hand, that may be just what you want. Applying Windows Updates requires actually rebooting; logging out isn't sufficient to free some of the files that are locked and thus prevented from updating.

On the other other hand, you don't even need to log out to free the memory that Firefox leaks. All you need to do is close the app and restart it. Firefox even has a hotkey for this: Ctrl-Alt-R. And it'll even remember your open tabs (or it does if you're using TabMixPlus's session manager, anyway).

[wreckedcarzz]

I have TMP, and was just using FF as an example - but it looks like there isn't any easy way to log off and then back on without a full reboot. I know that with TweakUI (and via some complicated Run command in Vista) you can set Windows to auto login on boot, but I don't want to reboot the whole thing (if you haven't seen Vista's boot time compared to XP on the same box, it is ... astoundingly longer).

  Oh well.

[steeladept]

I would have to double check (I can do so at work tonight), but I thought you could use TweakUI to login on logoff as well.  As I recall, it isn't very difficult even by registry settings - as long as you know which two or three settings to chage.  I suppose regshot and TweakUI may be able to tell us that if I can get TweakUI to do what you want.

[wreckedcarzz]

Still, TweakUI won't help here - its a Vista box that I need to do this on. Grr. Microsoft makes such an awesome program, then doesn't update it. Kill off the good and update the bad. Gah.