Replace Edge with Internet Explorer on Windows 10 Taskbar via Task Sequence

UPDATE: 02.15.2017 - I have updated this process around version 1607 which you can find here.

Now that I am very close to making Windows 10 available to the masses I have begun the polishing phase. Edge is not ready for us yet so until that point, I need to change the defaults from Edge to Internet Explorer. However we want Edge to be available for anyone who wants it so LTSB was out. I dont want to remove it, just make IE front and center until Edge is ready. I am looking to change this

to this

which should be easy right? Not so in Windows 10. It was a brutal process to get going. In previous Operating Systems its a no big deal and even in W10 its easy to do to AFTER the first login if you transition from the default user to touching existing user profiles. The key being initial login. Whatever the process is that is the  "Hi"... "Were glad your here"... stomps over several settings made to default user regardless of you using CopyProfile or making specific changes to the profile during deployment in the Task Sequence.

Attempt One

My first method was to use verbs (overview) for the items I want to remove and pin. It has worked well in Windows 7 and since the taskbar returned in Windows 10 I thought it would work. It does work post initial login for any legacy programs. However Edge, being a modern app does not have verbs.  To give examples of working with Modern Apps, to create a shortcut for Edge you would use this:

%windir%\SystemApps\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\MicrosoftEdge.exe

Or this if you want to goto a specific site:

%windir%\explorer.exe microsoft-edge:http://kevinisms.fason.org

So using verbs failed because I could not unpin Edge or the Store and the "Hi"... process stomps all over it anyway.

Attempt Two

Since that did not work I will just have to go oldschool and set it up on a donor machine and then import via the Task Sequence.

Two areas of focus. One is this registry path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband

In this location you have several binary (REG_BINARY) values so its easier to export it from a donor machine and import then to do a 'REG ADD' of each one individually.

The second is this file path:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

This houses the shortcuts for the items on the Taskbar. Note that these are only used for the icon bitmaps and not the actual launching, that is handled by the 'Favorites' Binary value in the registry location above.

This works if you import it and copy the files, though you do need to log out and back in or restart explorer.exe. For deployment purposes the "Hi"... process stomps over it during first login and sets the Tasbar to the initial screenshot above. Its nice that it will add your slot 3 and on pinnings so the Store icon can be gone. Not so much what I am looking for however.

I also learned that "Hi"... will remove any 'Internet Explorer*.lnk' files it finds under the %APPDATA% User Pinned path. I tried various incarnations such as 'Internet Explorer 11.lnk' however IE11.lnk is not removed. It just means when you right click the Taskbar icon it states IE instead of Internet Explorer. Not everyone knows what IE is so had to work another solution for this part.

In a Task Sequence, you import the reg file and the shortcuts to the paths above modified for the default user which I cover below.

Attempt Three

Attempt two works mechanically, now we just need to work around the "Hi"... headache. So lets use Active Setup. For this we copy the REG file and shortcuts (centered around HKCU) to the default user TEMP via the Task Sequence. We import another reg key for the Active Setup under HKLM. The import ran and HKCU reflects the version called out in Active Setup. This failed as Active Setup is run before or during the "Hi"... process. Changing the version and logging back in it works fine, again post initial login it works fine.

Attempt Four

Now we get to try RunOnce instead of Active Setup. This works! downside is a 2-3 second delay after loading the desktop for RunOnce to call the script. It works so I'll take it for now until I discover a more elequent method of mitigating the "Hi"... process

For the package you need a few things from the donor machine. After setting up the taskbar they way you like you need to export this path in the registry to 'Taskband.reg':

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband

You also need to get the shortcut links from here and put them in a folder called 'TaskbandShortcuts'. If you browse to it you'll find that the 'User Pinned' folder is hidden. You do not need to make this hidden in the package as the first login will take care of this.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

After that you would create the script to populate it by copying the below content into 'Taskband.CMD'. During initial login a DOSBox will pop up running the below for 2-3 seconds. It copies the shortcuts into the users profile at the path above then imports the registry file we created and restarts explorer.exe, otherwise a logout and login is needed. Any language will work, I chose CMD since its simple.

 :: from kevinisms.fason.org  
 :: By Kevin Fason  
 :: This batch file will Modify the Start bar to include some commonly used icons.  
 :: Since Windows 10 overrides during new profile creation this is done post that process  
 :: Created by Kevin Fason  
 ::  
 :: v1.0  02.10.2016  
 ::     Initial Release  
 ::Setup Shop  
 @ECHO OFF  
 TITLE Setting Default Taskbar, Please wait . . .  
 CLS  
 :: Import taskband settings  
 reg import %~dp0taskband.reg  
 :: Copy initial shortcuts  
 DEL /F "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\*.lnk"  
 xcopy %~dp0TaskbandShortcuts\*.* "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar" /E /C /I /H /Y  
 :: Restart desktop process to reflect changes  
 taskkill /f /im explorer.exe  
 start explorer.exe  
 :: END  

Last up is the reg file to put in RunOnce to set this all up. Under the default user RunOnce call the CMD. Call it TaskbandRunOnce.reg.

 [HKEY_USERS\DefU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce]  
 "Setup Taskband"="cmd /c %TEMP%\\Taskbar\\taskband.cmd"  

Couple things of note with this RunOnce reg file. One is 'DefU' in the path that I will cover below and the other is the command itself. REG_SZ does not numerate variables so thats why I am calling it with 'cmd /c ...' so that it will enumerate the userse %TEMP% variable. You could instead create this as a REG_EXPAND_SZ and call any variables in the command however it is a binary so it looks funny in REG files as shown here. This example simply calls '%TEMP%\Taskbar\taskband.cmd".

 [HKEY_USERS\DefU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce]   
  "Setup Taskband"=hex(2):25,00,54,00,45,00,4d,00,50,00,25,00,5c,00,54,00,61,00,73,00,6b,\  
  00,62,00,61,00,72,00,5c,00,74,00,61,00,73,00,6b,00,62,00,61,00,6e,00,64,00,\  
  2e,00,63,00,6d,00,64,00,00,00  

Task Sequence

Now that the package is setup we have to get it going in the task sequence. Very simple once you see it.

In my deployment TS I have a group called Registry changes and in it we mount the default users registry along with make any changes to HKLM then unmount it. All the Defualt user stuff is grouped together and ran after the HKLM stuff.

To mount I do what many do by doing Run Command Line step with 

 REG.EXE LOAD HKU\DefU "%OSDISK%\Users\Default\ntuser.dat"

and now anything affecting the default user registry just gets any HKCU reference changed to 'HKU\DefU\'. Once done unmount it via another Command Line step with 

REG.EXE UNLOAD HKU\DefU

So for the 'Set Default taskband RunOnce' reg setting its just a command step to import the TaskBandRunOnce REG file we created earlier with the Taskband package mounted in the step.

Reg.exe import TaskbandRunOnce.reg

Another option would be to do a 'REG ADD...' command vs importing a file and I may switch to that in the future. I did the REG in case I ever change to using a REG_EXPAND_SZ value.

Now that we have the RunOnce primed to run upon first login we need to get the Taskband content into the default user. For that is a simple copy command step called 'Copy Taskband Shortcuts to Default Profile Temp'.

xcopy *.* "%OSDISK%\users\Default\AppData\Local\Temp\Taskbar" /E /C /I /H /Y

All done. To take this polishing a little further I also modified the default browser to be IE and Johan had this process written up so I wont rehash it here.

Additionally I customized the Start Menu itself. Bill Moore did a great job writing that one up as well. I will say that the "Hi"... process removes any references to IE in Start so to get around that I just mount the above package via a step and copy the 'Internet Explorer.lnk' to the default user start menu and on the donor machine I pin that shortcut to the Start Menu.

xcopy "TaskbandShortcuts\Internet Explorer.lnk" "%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" /E /C /I /H /Y

-Kevin Fason

F8 workaround in Windows 10 ADK post Sysprep

If you are on the Windows 10 ADK (either) you may have noticed that pressing F8 for command support, is not consistent. While in PE it works great, but after sysprep runs and you are in the full OS, the ability to use F8 to bring up a command prompt is spotty. My firm put in a premier ticket and was told it will get fixed at the next ADK release, post 1511. We are not big enough for them to immediately fix nor did they agree it was a needed function of OSD. This of course does no good today and prevents me from looking at smsts.log or doing other diagnosing tasks tracking problems down.

So until then, I came up with a simple workaround using ServiceUI.exe from MDT. While we do not have MDT integrated into our ConfigMgr instance, we do have a package with MDT in it to use the useful scripts from it if needed. SImply put, create a 'Run Command' step with this in it against the MDT package.

 Tools\x64\ServiceUI.exe -process:TSProgressUI.exe %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\cmd.exe /k title Task Sequence Stopped, Close to Continue. . .  

The title switch is optional and since we use 1E Nomad we also have to prestage the MDT Scripts package. Note that unlike using command support (F8) this will pause the Task Sequence until you exit the shell, so keep that in mind. You may need to do one before the bad step and after so you can do any comparisons. Additionally for the problem step you will need to mark it continue on error so this cmd step will run right after and you can do some diagnosing. Once figured out just remove this step and disable the continue on error if needed.

Niall Brady's WindowsNoob posting was my initial thought being to modify his vbs to invoke cmd.exe since natively it just pauses the TS expecting you to F8. The above was a simpler route.

-Kevin Fason

VMWare Workstation proc vs core

I had a couple questions about my old Image Mule article and configuring VM procs so thought I’d share with everyone. Basically, unless you have licensing issues just use 1 socket with two core each. This will allow you to have A LOT of machines going with more resources spread out. For example:

While a single proc with two cores appears to present the same thing as shown here,

It actually is NOT presented to the OS the same. Simply put, a Core is ≠ to a processor. Intel, AMD, and even ARM define cores differently. The OS is actually told how many virtual processors (sockets) and cores within those processors. Coreinfo is a great tool to see the underpinnings of how Windows interprets how compute is presented to a VM. Great fun to compare settings. Performance-wise you generally don’t see much difference between processors/cores counts. People smarter than me have done the benchmarks and it comes down to the task at hand mostly, but firmly the licensing of the product you want to run in the VM. This is part of why Microsoft has moved SQL to per core costs and Windows 2016 is going to be that way as well.

While licensing generally applies more on the servers it can apply to what you do on the workstation side. Windows 7 only allows two physical processors (aka sockets) for example. and Windows 10 has the same hardware requirements back to Windows 7. We don’t necessarily have NUMA concerns like ESXI does so much but it can apply if you are doing something intensive. 

I would also suggest you keep the processor cores below what your host system has per VM, and quite frankly, Workstation gets mad if you try more. The host does need some resources, however with that said, VMWare is really good about slicing and dicing. I generally see 4:1 vCPU to physical most of the time.

You can read through this to understand CPU socket vs core from VMWare perspective whereas this is Microsoft's take on it. For Imaging, the captures go great deal faster if you use multiple procs and more memory, like anything else. Capturing a six GB Windows 7 image takes ~40 minutes on a virtual machine with one vCPU, but only ~25 minutes when using two vCPU’s. Additionally Windows 7 has a couple hundred patches these days that may cause you to run out of memory. Settings the VM memory to 4GB solves that problem whereas I use 2GB for other deployment testing.

Also, VMWare workstation has support for BIOS or UEFI so as you mess more with Windows 10 I suggest you start using UEFI so you can learn those features and get your Task Sequences to support UEFI anyhow. Johan has a list of Windows 10 features that require it for example.

-Kevin Fason