Batch File Help

[WhiteMouse]

Me and a buddy are working on a project for school. The guidelines for the project was our choice of manipulating

windows in some way. BTW the class is Computer Securities.

We want to move the Windows Taskbar from its default position to the right, up top, to the left, then to the bottom again in a loop only using a .bat file w/ out restarting the computer. We've tried changing the registry file HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\TaskbarWinXP then restarting the explorer, but it isn't working.

@echo off
echo Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 >> up.reg
echo. >> up.reg
echo [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop] >> up.reg
echo "Toolbars"=hex:11,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 >> up.reg
echo "TaskbarWinXP"=hex:0c,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,aa,4f,28,68,\ >> up.reg
echo 48,6a,d0,11,8c,78,00,c0,4f,d9,18,b4,0c,03,00,00,e0,0c,00,00,00,00,00,00,1e,\ >> up.reg
echo 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,1e,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00 >> up.reg
start "D:\Documents and Settings\student\Desktop\up.reg"
taskkill /f /Im explorer.exe
explorer.exe

to get the right info for the registry file, we moved the bar manually then restarted the comp, and then got the correct hex out of it.

I guess my questions would be is this the correct file to change for what we want and what errors do you guys see in the above code. BTW the code is for moving the taskbar to the top.

Thx for your help.

[Sl45h3R]

Try use AutoIT or something similar to move the mouse and drag it where you want.

[Sparda]

The trouble is that approximately 4000 registry keys are accessed by the process of "right click task bar" > "properties" > "select new position" > "ok". Finding which ones are the correct ones is going to be a complete nightmare.

I just tried diffing the my user key between task bar position changes, the number of changes made in such a short time is ridiculous and non of the changes seem to be related to the task bar in any way (from there names).

The easiest way to make it work would be to 'snapshot' (read "Export") large section of the registry until you grab enough of it to make it work by trial and error (probably start with HKUK/Software/Microsoft/Windows and work backwards form there). Importing 'old' versions of the registry is potentially damaging, as long as it's restricted to your user account the worst you'd have to do is delete and recreate your user profile.

I did look for a way to do this with C# as well, but no luck. I guess Microsoft really did want the user to control this particular feature.