Unlock The Taskbar, Show Quick Launch

A friend of mine doesn't have a computer at home, and uses one at the Senior Center every day. Since they're public computers, all the settings are reset to defaults when they're rebooted, which happens automatically overnight even if nobody does it manually. He was talking about having to change settings to the way he likes them every day -- unlock the taskbar, show Quick Launch, set the font face and size in WordPad, set the margins on Page Setup, allow active content to run from local files in IE,... It amused me to write a little app that changed all these settings to the way he liked them, using CreateProcess to start up apps, and SendMessage to send keystrokes and mouse clicks to them. I gave it to him so he could put it on his flash drive and run it when he got to the Senior Center every morning. When he watched it running, popping up app windows and changing their settings, he asked me, "So you have something that records keystrokes, and now you're just playing them back?"

His question sort of intrigued me. I heard of something like this a few years ago, somebody I talked to at Yahoo chess was running long joke messages through the chat area. He said he had something that would record his keystrokes and save them as "macros", and play them back. Apparently there's shareware out there that does this kind of thing, but as you might guess from what I've already said, I write computer programs for fun, and with shareware, somebody else gets to have all the fun. Besides that, I never put shareware on my computer anyway, because of the possibility that it contains viruses or worms or whatever. I've fiddled around some, trying to figure out how to record keystrokes and mouse clicks. First I tried to use SetCapture, but as soon as the mouse clicks on something outside the app window that has the capture, it loses the capture. Then I tried setting up a transparent window over the whole screen and passing on all mouse clicks and keystrokes to the window that would receive it if my transparent window weren't there, but that didn't work either, because windows react differently to input if they're covered up by another window, even if it's transparent.....