Logon Menu  Release 2.0

I give this program as freeware. Only thing I ask is that you drop me an email to let me know what you think. This is my fourth attempt at writing a Visual Basic program. My name is Karl Wurth and my email address is kwurth@bellsouth.net. I would really appreciate hearing from you. You may distribute this program freely, provided you include everything in the original zip file. This program is available on the web at http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/memory/67/logonmnu.html. The distribution file does not include the Visual Basic 5 runtime, which is also available on my web page.

	How to Install
Unzip the logonmnu.zip file to a work directory and run the setup exec. You will be prompted for the installation directory. Please note, you must have the Visual Basic 5 runtime files installed.




	What is this program?
I wrote this program because I got tired of fighting for computer time with my kids. I'm sure none of you have ever had that problem right??  

  Anyway, The user signon data is stored in the system registry. This data is consisted of User Id, Password, Minutes per day, Last signon date and Available minutes. To edit this data, you need to sign on as ADMINISTRATOR. The first time you run the program the administrator password is set to ADMINISTRATOR. After you have signed on as the administrator, you may change the administrator password, add, update or delete users from the security data. 

How the program works:

   To change/add or delete users you must logon as ADMINISTRATOR. Remember, the first time you run the program the administrator password is the same as the user id. You should change this to a password you don't forget.

   Logon Menu is limited to 10 User Id's (including system administrator). If enough people can convince me to do so, I will up this limit to 15 or 20. When you are signed on as administrator and press Exit on the administrator screen, the program will terminate. This is the only way you can close the program without executing the logoff action. If you logoff as administrator, control is returned to logon screen and the logoff action is not performed.

   When the logon screen is displayed, the program launching capabilities of windows 95 are disabled. In addition, the system desktop, task switching and three finger salute (CTRL/ALT/DEL) are disabled. The user must enter a valid User Id and password. The password is not echoed on the screen.	

   When a normal user signs on, the active user screen is displayed. On the active user screen they may change their password, minimize the screen or logoff. If the user closes the window then the logoff action is performed. The logoff action options are displayed and controlled from this screen. The two options are SHUTDOWN and RESTART. Shutdown will terminate windows. Restart will terminate windows and restart windows. The reason this was done was to ensure that all programs were terminated at logoff time. You should set an User Id up for yourself and set the time limit to 999999. This in effect gives you 999,999 minutes per day. 

    The active user screens also displays sliding status bar that depicts graphically how much percentage of their time they have left and additionally displays the number of minutes remaining. When this screen is minimized, an icon is added to the system tray of a "Computer Monitor". If the mouse is moved to this icon, a message is displayed stating how many minutes the user has remaining. If the user clicks a mouse button on the icon, the screen is restored. If the user changes the system clock, they lose thier remaining time for the day.

    As the user is running other programs, their remaining times are decremented. When 5 minutes remain, a system level message is displayed warning them. This message will interrupt any other programs they are running to ensure that they see the message. Once their time reaches zero, then the logon action is performed. A user may logoff before their time expires by restoring the Active user screen and pressing logoff or closing the screen. 
 	
Don't let any of this stuff scare you, it's really not as hard as it sounds. When you use the Administrator function you will see how simple it really is.

 


	Some Advice:
Because this program shuts down windows, I suggest you do not auto-start it until you have time to play with it and see how it works. Once you are comfortable with it, then you have 3 options,

	1. Put a shortcut for it in your start-up group: This is fine if your users are not really hackers and don't mess with your startup.

	2. Put it as a Run in your win.ini file: this is a little more secure.

	3. Make it autorun in your system registry: This is probably the most secure and hardest to do. 

If you're not sure how to do number 2 or 3, I suggest you use suggestion 1 as it is the easiest.


	Again, If you download this and use it, please take a few mins to drop me a line. I am just interested in your thoughts, if you liked it, stuff like that. This Visual Basic is pretty new to me but I am really enjoying using it for development.  Again, my name is Karl Wurth and my email address is kwurth@bellsouth.net

   Visit my homepage at http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/memory/67/index.html


 