How to remove or disable Ease of Access button on Windows 7 login screen

Question

Question refers to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

When I lock my computer I don't want people to be able to mess about with it, so would like the Ease of Access button (in the bottom left corner of the logon screen) to either be removed or disabled.

Answer 1

Disable the Ease of Access button

Clicking the button would usually start Utilman.exe, which in turn would display the Ease of Access options. You can override the executable, thus making the button useless.

1. Open an elevated command prompt.

2. Type or paste the following command, and press Enter:

   reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\Utilman.exe" /v "Debugger" /t REG_SZ /d "systray.exe" /f
   

Changes are applied immediately.

How it works

The Image File Execution Options registry key was designed, among other things, to automatically launch a debugger when an application starts. While the debugger would start the application and attach, you can specify just any executable which will be run instead, thus overriding the original one.

What about systray.exe? It's a little stub program which was first introduced with Windows 95, and used to handle the system notification icons. It's not really used any more in the newer Windows versions, and it was mostly kept for backward compatibility reasons. It has no user interface, and wouldn't do anything noticeable besides refreshing the notification area when started. Anything launched in the logon screen runs under NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM, which has no desktop or taskbar, so nothing will happen.

Pros

• No system file or security permissions tweaking.
• Future-proof: works even if authui.dll or Utilman.exe get updated.
• No third party software involved.

Cons

• Although the button won't do anything, it will still be visible/clickable.
• As a side effect, you won't be able to manually start the Utility Manager (Utilman.exe) elsewhere, nor the Screen Magnifier unless you use the /noutilman switch (e.g. Magnify.exe /noutilman).

Answer 2

An easy way to do this is to use Ease of Access Disabler 1.6 from http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Ease-of-Access-disabler.shtml. It should work on both Vista and win7.

Answer 3

Even if this is a little bit older, I found a way to remove the accessibility button on 64-bit systems.

1. Create a backup of your Authui.dll in C:\Windows\System32
2. ListOpen C:\Windows\System32\Authui.dll in a hex editor (like Hex Workshop)
3. List item
4. Find this text atom(Accessibility)
5. Shortly after the text above, you should find a text saying layoutpos="left"
6. Replace the "left" with "none"
7. Save authui.dll

Answer 4

The following steps will remove the button completely:

1. Create a backup of your Authui.dll in C:\Windows\System32
2. Open C:\Windows\System32\Authui.dll in a resource editor (PE Explorer)
3. Go the the UIFILE folder and double-click the 12400 XAML file
4. Find this text <if id="atom(Accessibility)">
5. Delete everything following that text - it should be 46 lines - stop at <if id="atom(ToggleTabletKeyboard)">
6. Save/close the file and do steps 4 and 5 for the 12401 and 12402 XAML files

If you feel uncomfortable modifying system files, there are also third-party apps that will disable the button.

If you are using 64-bit Windows edition, you'll also need to replace authui.dll file present in "C:\Windows\sysWOW64\" folder.

Answer 5

Seriously a lot of work here when the answer is simple.

Delete, move or rename c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

You'll need to take ownership of it to allow you to do it but far easier than messing with dll's or even the registry.