Last week I had an urgent support call to attend to as an e-commerce site I'd developed for a customer had stopped taking payments. You can imagine I jumped on to it pretty sharpish.

The problem soon became apparent - the payment-processing terminal wasn't running. The server had been re-booted and, although Domino re-started as a Service, as expected, the payment terminal didn't. This is because I (stupidly) had put a shortcut to the program in the "All Users" Startup Folder and assumed it would load if ever the machine re-started for any reason.

It turns out programs in the Startup folder only launch if a user logs in. In this case nobody did and so they never launched. Seems so obvious. What was I thinking!

As a quick fix I had them log in to Windows. I then went about finding a way to have the terminal launch without them needing to log in.

Launching Programs When Windows Boots

It turns out it's not as easy as you might imagine to run a program when Windows starts but before a user logs in. The only solution I found was to create your very own Service.

The process of creating your own service to run a batch file is documented in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

However, it only allows you to run one BAT file and it has to be called AutoExNT.bat. Whereas, in my case I wanted to run two different BAT files. One for each payment terminal (one live and one for testing). It turns out you can do this by calling the two (or more I guess) batch files directly from inside the AutoExNT.bat file.

Here's what my AutoExNT.bat file looks like:

start C:\path\to\batch\1\launch.bat
C:\path\to\batch\2\launch.bat

The first line tells the existing command prompt to launch a new instance and load the first batch file in it. The second line then goes on to run the other batch file. The result being two command prompts running the code in the relevant batch file. Et voila.

Don't forget to install the Service with the /interactive flag set to On if you want to see the prompts yourself when you log in. Oh, and to check the Service is set to Automatic.

• the background color of dialogs;
• the background color of buttons (OK, Cancel, and so on);
• color labels of these buttons.