Deutsch
Windows Active Setup
Active Setup is a mechanism for executing commands once per user early during logon. Active Setup is used by some operating system components like Internet Explorer to set up an initial configuration for new users logging on for the first time.Active Setup is also used in some corporation’s software distribution systems to create an initial customized user environment. To understand why such a mechanism is necessary we need to take a step back.
Application programs use two different types of data: machine-specific data like the files in the installation directory, and user-specific data like the information which document a user last edited with the application. Installing machine-specific data is simple: just copy it to
C:\Program Files and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and you are done. But how to get an initial user configuration into a user profile? Writing into the profile of the user doing the install does not help because we need the initial configuration for all users logging on to the system.
One solution to this problem is Active Setup. It uses both machine-specific data and user-specific data. The machine part consists of a list of components identified by a GUID each. The user part is basically a mirror of the machine data, but, and this is the key point, it does not exist in new user profiles. Whenever a user logs on, Active Setup checks if each machine part component GUID is present in the user part. If not, the component’s command is executed and the component’s GUID is stored in the user part. If it is, the current user profile has already been initialized and no further action is required.
Active Setup runs before the Desktop appears. Commands started by Active Setup run synchronously, blocking the logon while they are executing. Active Setup is executed before any Run or RunOnce registry entries are evaluated.
