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Interactive Services


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Hello,

I have written a program that is for lack of a better/original name our "App Store". As the name suggests it contains a bunch of approved applications that are hosted on the network, that students can install on their system.

You may suggest otherwise, but the application is fine and I am not really after help with code for my App Store. What I am having problems with is getting the program to interact better with the end user.

So we have provided every high school student with a netbook. These machines are not joined to the domain, and the student has no admin rights. They do have a domain account that they use for a Cloud application access and machines in computer labs.

As with many programs, updates are constantly released and the app store idea came about so the students could update their machines themselves. These PCs are running Windows 7 Professional. We cannot give them the local administrator password, so installing applications as a standard user is a challenge. I used a UDF found on the forum that creates a service, and I then use 2 Microsoft utilities to get that to work for the user. One of the utilities sets permissions on the service, so a standard user can start and stop the service. The other program, SRVANY.exe, allows my GUI to run as a service. The service wouldn't run a GUI without it.

Running the "App Store" as a service, allows me to run the application as SYSTEM, meaning the students have full admin rights using the application. However, simply running the service as SYSTEM or the local admin account is not enough. If I just run the service like this, the program runs under a different session and I never see the GUI.

To get around this I run the service in "Interactive Services Desktop" mode.

Here is the problem. In this mode, the application seems to time out during the middle of an application install and logs the user out. It's either almost like there is a time limit and/or the programs that I install interact with the OS that causes the system to log out of Interactive Desktop Services mode.

Does anyone know a way around this, or maybe to have the GUI operate without being in Interactive Desktop services?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/gg465091

I found the site about that describes about session 0, but I don't know how Id implement this in AutoIT. Unfortunately the API's required arent in an already created UDF, and I have tried creating API's before and it's not easy! :-) Although I am still working on creating a Credential Manager API for AutoIT.

Anyway, if anyone has suggestions on this I'd appreciate the feedback.

Thanks,

Jeff

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