Altering the "Start" button

[Gig-O-Ram]

I was looking at this site that had lots of registry tweaks, and one of them is a way to customize the text on the "Start" button to whatever you want, to a supposed five character limit (though one guy did 9).

The whole procedure, which includes using an editor to get into the compiled code of Explorer.exe and changing the text, and making a change in the reg, not only sounds like a major P.I.T.A., but it has the side effect of more or less (in some cases) causing Windows to have problems or not work at all.

I'm curious if anyone has done this, and also why does simply changing text in the .exe code cause system wide problems? All it is, is changing line 578 from "Start" to "whatever" (or maybe it would only like "whate", LOL).

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by Gig-O-Ram

I was looking at this site that had lots of registry tweaks, and one of them is a way to customize the text on the "Start" button to whatever you want, to a supposed five character limit (though one guy did 9).

The whole procedure, which includes using an editor to get into the compiled code of Explorer.exe and changing the text, and making a change in the reg, not only sounds like a major P.I.T.A., but it has the side effect of more or less (in some cases) causing Windows to have problems or not work at all.

I'm curious if anyone has done this, and also why does simply changing text in the .exe code cause system wide problems? All it is, is changing line 578 from "Start" to "whatever" (or maybe it would only like "whate", LOL).

Done that before.
If you write more than 5 characters you won't get any problems, it just won't be displayed. You need to resize the "container" which contains the text (make it wider) to see the rest of the characters. If you look for instance at Windows XP in french, Start is "Démarrer".
It's a cool customization but not necessarily worth it. Altering system files and whatnot, I don't know but it never seemed like a good idea.
Unless you talk about changing the oemlogo container to add a bigger picture...