JJ,

Just found out that posting WM_QUIT to the Progman window cleanly
shutdown the desktop process without showing any dialog.

..... Shucks, I should have thought of trying that myself.

And you just tried that yourself to see if it would work for me, did you ?
Thanks. :-)

The desktop process does the normal registry writes like it does
when pressing the shutdown dialog's Cancel button while the
CTRL+SHIFT+ALT keys are held down.

That info is new to me, and I can't remember having ever encountered it.
Again, thanks. (I did try to cancel, but that didn't shut explorer down)

ShellBags and CleanShutdown registry values.

About that: I found that changing the "vid" value works on every folder
thats not currently visible, without needing tho reboot explorer.exe

The only thing I currently need that forced-kill reboot for is the default
settings for a not-yet opened folder (... \explorer\streams - settings)

By the way, I've decided to start with an automated dialog changes (1), and
do the rest by applying registry changes .
(1) you cannot change byte 0x20 in the toolbar settings to switch the
QuickLaunch bar on on a just-installed copy, because that byte simply is not
there yet.

And good gracious, some dis- or enablers of this/or/that can be put in at
/many/ places in the registry. Tried to keep mine in the HKCU branch. But
even than ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser