Hi,
we are using Win NT 4.0 SP6a english and german versions. If you don't change any group settings all users of the group Users are not allowed to shutdown Windows. All the accounts in the domain where I work and on my home machine are in this group (execpt of the domain and local administrator and those you need for back office and other system tasks).
What normally happens when you shutdown is that explorer.exe (your standard shell) will call functions in a process named smss.exe. This process is responsible for login, logout and shut down. This process is the first process in the win32 subsystem of Win NT and Win 2000. Since no user is logged on when the process is created this one runs with system account. This is described in th
e book "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000".
For some reasons an account can change the security token which prevents the functions ExitWindows and ExitWindowsEx to do their expected work.
I have downloaded and tested Shutdown.vi on Win NT. I checked "Shutdown" and "Force" and let it run. Really my NT didn't shutdown. And you will get no error!
You say you are using WinXP. Since I have no WinXP available I could not test it. Maybe Microsoft has changed the default setting of the tokens so that ExitWindows and ExitWindowsEx work like on Win 98SE. Or do you have the home edition and not the professional? On XP Home there is only a limited security support like in Win98SE. So I think there it will work fine.
Waldemar
Using 7.1.1, 8.5.1, 8.6.1, 2009 on XP and RT
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