How to run an application as shell replacement on Windows 10 Enterprise

Question

I need to create a special account on a computer running Windows 10 Enterprise. This account would launch an application directly on login instead of the default shell and e

Answer 1

I wanted to do something similar, and I borrowed heavily from other answers, but none of them were a complete working answer for me. Here's what I ended up doing.

1. Create a new user account
2. Setup the following vbs script (largely inspired by this thread) to launch the shell application and name it something like "launch.vbs"

set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") 
sCmd="d:\launchbox\launchbox.exe" 
oShell.run sCmd,,true 'true forces it to wait for process to finish 
sCmd="shutdown /r /t 0" 
oShell.run sCmd

3. Login as the new user

4. Run regedit

5. Add a new string value named Shell to HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon with a value of the command that you need to run to execute your script:

wscript d:\launchbox\launch.vbs

6. Logoff and log back on as the user to see it in action