dave posted : It so happens I have an XP system hanging around in my basement: it's in a close-to as-installed state as I'm likely to find, mainly because I'm rebuilding it to probably give to someone.
I just now went and took a look at it.
Guess what? ctrl+alt+del does nothing there either.
So, we can rule out malware. This system is clean: it hasn't been anwhere (net-wise) and hasn't done anything.
It was configured for standard XP theme, welcome-screen logon, and no password required.
I did try and change it to 'users must enter password' which made no difference.
When I get some time (I'm busy right now) I'll see if I can figure it out. There's a bunch of configuration that I'd do as a matter of course if this were going to be my own system, and that results in ctrl+alt+del switching to the winlogon 'menu' as I said before. But I don't want to just do all that stuff on this XP system, so I'll have to try one step at a time and back it out.
Question for Win7 users: what does ctrl+alt+del do on your systems? On mine it... switches to the secure desktop. Pretty blue screen, green leaf floating around, the usual 5 or so choices of things to do, including run task manager. But I forget if it comes like that naturally.
If you think I'm unnecessarily harping on winlogon, it's because that's the program that owns ctrl+alt+del. It's qualitatively different to other shortcut key sequences. So, it seems to me that's where we should be looking for changing how ctrl+alt+del behaves.
I just now went and took a look at it.
Guess what? ctrl+alt+del does nothing there either.
So, we can rule out malware. This system is clean: it hasn't been anwhere (net-wise) and hasn't done anything.
It was configured for standard XP theme, welcome-screen logon, and no password required.
I did try and change it to 'users must enter password' which made no difference.
When I get some time (I'm busy right now) I'll see if I can figure it out. There's a bunch of configuration that I'd do as a matter of course if this were going to be my own system, and that results in ctrl+alt+del switching to the winlogon 'menu' as I said before. But I don't want to just do all that stuff on this XP system, so I'll have to try one step at a time and back it out.
Question for Win7 users: what does ctrl+alt+del do on your systems? On mine it... switches to the secure desktop. Pretty blue screen, green leaf floating around, the usual 5 or so choices of things to do, including run task manager. But I forget if it comes like that naturally.
If you think I'm unnecessarily harping on winlogon, it's because that's the program that owns ctrl+alt+del. It's qualitatively different to other shortcut key sequences. So, it seems to me that's where we should be looking for changing how ctrl+alt+del behaves.