How to Change XP logon Screen


The logon screens consist of both the Classic Logon screen, and the new Welcome Screen. The classic screen is one of the easiest to modify, as it’s just changing a couple resources, however, the Welcome screen gets more complicated as it also consists of alittle HTML like script to tell of it’s placement. For the Welcome screen however, I’m going to suggest using LogonStudio, however it’s usage will not be described here. In time however, this page will be updated to reflect manual changing of the Welcome Screen.
I will just be covering how to edit the Classic Logon screen, and how to get Windows to use either of the modified screens.
» Editing the Classic Logon Screen
The Classic Logon screen is located in the file msgina.dll in your system32 directory. Open that file up in your favorite resource editor. I recommend Resource Tuner, but ResEdit will do you if you don’t want to pay for Resource Tuner.
* Open up msgina.dll in your resource editor, and select the image you wish to replace. Look below for a table of the corresponding resource numbers and descriptions.
* Once you have image resource selected, click the Replace button
Image Resource
And select the image you wish to replace it with. I recommend using the same dimensions as the original image, to avoid any potential conflicts.
* Once your done editing the file, open the File menu and click Save As
Save As
and name it anything you want, just remember the name. Save it in your $OEM$\$$\system32 directory.
Below you will find a table with the more common bitmap resource numbers and descriptions. The larger of the two images (dimension wise), is displayed when the logon dialogue is waiting for the Username and Password. The other is used when it is logging onto the system.
Resource #
Description
103–This is the progress bar that is displayed just below the main image.
It’s present across all versions.
101–Windows XP Professional Edition main images
107
128–Windows XP Home Edition main images
129
130–Windows 2003 Standard Edition main images
131
132–Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition main images
133–
134–Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition main images
135–
145–Windows 2003 Web Edition main images
147–
» Getting Windows to use the new Logon screens
Make sure before you proceed, that your Classic Logon file and your Welcome screen are saved in $OEM$\$$\system32
» Method 1
All this is going to require is a Registry tweak.
For the Classic Logon screen, use
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
GinaDll=”mygina.dll”
Replacing mygina.dll with the name of your Classic Logon file.
For the Welcome screen, use
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
UIHost=”%systemroot%\system32\dragon.exe”
Replacing dragon.exe with the name of your Welcome screen file. As you may guess, you could have just very well have placed your file in another directory, AS LONG AS the path in this registry tweak is correct.
If the path to the Welcome screen is incorrect, it will then revert back to the Classic Logon screen, but the default one not the one you made.
If you use the Classic Logon screen tweak, then the Welcome screen will become disabled, so you can’t use both. You can however have both files on the system, you just can’t use the GinaDLL tweak when you want to use the Welcome screen.
» Method 2 (Permanent)
If want to override the old files COMPLETELY rename your welcome screen to “logonui” or your classic screen to “msgina” and compress them with the built cabinet maker (See compression page) Also be sure to run Modifype.exe before compressing. (See compression page). This Checksums the file so you don’t get a copy error when installing. After Modify and Cab compressing it drop in your I386 folder on your Xp Cd.