NT Gatekeeper: Changing the Appearance of the NT 4.0 Logon Screen

Can I easily change the appearance of the Windows NT 4.0 logon screen (the one that appears when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del)? We want to replace the icon in the dialog box's upper left corner with a company logo and change the dialog box's caption and introductory text.

Resource Hacker is a freeware utility that lets you view, modify, rename, add, delete, and extract resources in 32-bit Windows executables and DLLs. The utility is available for free from http://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker.

Microsoft doesn't support this utility, of course, so I don't need to tell you that you should first test the tool on a lab machine. Also, make sure you have an operational backup before you implement the logon-screen changes on your production systems.

To change the NT 4.0 logon screen's appearance, you need to modify the content of msgina.dll, which is in the Windows system directory, as Figure 1 shows. To open the Resource Hacker GUI, run reshacker.exe. To modify the icon displayed in the logon dialog box, expand the Icon11033 containers and select Action, Replace Icon from the menu bar. To change the dialog box's caption and introductory text, expand the Dialog14501033 containers, make the appropriate changes in the dialog box's right pane, then click Compile Script. You can find more information about the Resource Hacker utility and how to use it in the Help files that you can download from the above URL.