setting desktop wallpaper

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From: Alex (nospam_at_spam.spam)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 14:22:31 +0100

Hi,

I'm currently using a policy on my win2k3 server that enables active desktop
and sets the desktop wallpaper to a company branding jpg in the sysroot
folder.

I'm not totally happy with using Active Desktop to set the wallpaper as

1. I'm having different results on win2k clients where eveything appears to
be set correctly but the wallpaper is not being displayed
2. It's slow, the wall paper doesn't appear instantly at logon and you can
see any previous wall papers set by various applications (e.g. IE set
picture as desktop wallpaper) before the active desktop loads. Same happens
at shutdown and you can see the laptops struggle to unload active desktop
and load up previous desktop wallpapers.
3. on some machines it only loads the top quarter of the wallpaper and then
the rest of the screen remains black until you press F5

ideally I'd just like to set the wallpaper without active desktop. I've
looked but possibly can't see the trees for the forest (pun not intended)
and can't find a simple option just to set the desktop wallpaper without
using active desktop.

can anyone point me in the right direction?

Alternately, i'm running vb scripts anyway to copy wallpapers, screensavers,
document templates into the correct place onto the laptops. Is it possible
to use vb scripts to set the registry keys

for example :

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]

"Wallpaper"="C:\\Program Files\\AMT-SYBEX Branding Pack\\AMT-SYBEX Branding
Pack\\AMT-SYBEX_1024X768"
"WallpaperStyle"="2"

Tia,
Alex

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