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Logon Script Help - Hide RealVNC Icon from System Tray

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rxtrom

Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2003
Location
Philadelphia
You guys are very helpful in this forum, so I am sure I can get the answer here.

I am looking to setup a logon script for my company to Hide the realvnc system tray icon all the time.

I know if you right click on the taskbar and customize the icons, you can select a specific icon and choose to hide it all the time.

Problem is I do not want to do this to 100+ computers. =)

I am using realvnc 4 enterprise edition if that matters.

Thanks,

Rob
 
http://www.realvnc.com/products/vnctool/

http://www.realvnc.com/products/vnctool/vnctool.pdf

It appears you could install VNC, configure it, export the settings, import those settings into a host configuration using their deployment tool, then push that configured host to the computers. Or it could be easier than that - use the tool to manage your clients and push a common config to them.

I can't speak from experience, we use a third party management tool to deploy VNC to our managed clients and have not needed to hide the tray icon.

This would probably be better answered in the "applications and software" area. I'll flag it for a mod to move...
 
Last edited:
Pinky said:
http://www.realvnc.com/products/vnctool/

http://www.realvnc.com/products/vnctool/vnctool.pdf

It appears you could install VNC, configure it, export the settings, import those settings into a host configuration using their deployment tool, then push that configured host to the computers. Or it could be easier than that - use the tool to manage your clients and push a common config to them.

I can't speak from experience, we use a third party management tool to deploy VNC to our managed clients and have not needed to hide the tray icon.

This would probably be better answered in the "applications and software" area. I'll flag it for a mod to move...


Thanks for the reply.

I am using the VNCtool to install and export settings, but the hide icon setting does not exist for vnc. Even their website says it. SO I thought the work around was a reg hack that I can push via logon script.

I guess that is my question, how can I make a logon script to hide the icon because it is not a setting of the app.

Thanks
 
rxtrom said:
I guess that is my question, how can I make a logon script to hide the icon because it is not a setting of the app.

Gotcha ;)

I just did about 30 minutes of 'research' and ran into the same roadblocks as you. It appears that loading in the system tray is a 'feature' of winvnc4. Problem is that the executable determines its behavior, and version 4 (as far as I could tell) has no command line/switch to turn off/on the system tray. So I don't think we have a choice but to live with the system tray icon because that's the way realvnc want it.

I'm going to keep tabs to see if a solution is found. Got my curiosity peaked and I learned a little more about modifying services and vnc's advanced options, so wwin win for me. :)

I'd be interested to see if someone knows of a third party app that can suppress which items can/cannot be shown in the system tray, because from what I can tell that's about the only way to stop vnc from appearing.
 
Pinky said:
Gotcha ;)

I just did about 30 minutes of 'research' and ran into the same roadblocks as you. It appears that loading in the system tray is a 'feature' of winvnc4. Problem is that the executable determines its behavior, and version 4 (as far as I could tell) has no command line/switch to turn off/on the system tray. So I don't think we have a choice but to live with the system tray icon because that's the way realvnc want it.

I'm going to keep tabs to see if a solution is found. Got my curiosity peaked and I learned a little more about modifying services and vnc's advanced options, so wwin win for me. :)

I'd be interested to see if someone knows of a third party app that can suppress which items can/cannot be shown in the system tray, because from what I can tell that's about the only way to stop vnc from appearing.


Glad I could plant that little seed.

As far as hiding the system tray icons:

If you right click on the task bar, and click on properties
Then click customize in the notification area
Find the VNC icon, or any iucon for that matter
Then select always hide in the drop down menu.

This works.

BUT again I should have not rushed my original post. I appologize.

I knew how to supress the icon, I know it adds something to the win registry. I do not know what or where.

I do know I do not want to go through the above steps on all of our computers here.

That is where the logon script comes in. To just tweak the one reg entry.

I do not know how to create a logon script to change reg entrys, and U do not know which one to change. :)
 
As per RealVNC support,

"It is not possible to hide the VNC Server 4.0 tray icon. This is a
deliberate measure.

Cheers,

Wez @ RealVNC Ltd."

The icon is there as a result of the source code - not a registry entry. This was a change made in 4.0.
 
rxtrom said:
As far as hiding the system tray icons:

If you right click on the task bar, and click on properties
Then click customize in the notification area
Find the VNC icon, or any iucon for that matter
Then select always hide in the drop down menu.

This works.

I feel I should have known that, but it's one of those otherwise useless features unless you have a need for it... so I digress :D.

I did some more research, found a key that looked promising but couldn't tell if this was where windows was pulling info for all the tray icons.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify

Need more time to look into it, but I'm at work and don't pay me to work on ocforum member issues. :santa:
 
Hide Real VNC 4 Tray Icon [SOLVED]
I have created hacked files that you can use to hide the tray icons.
RealVNC will run completely hidden, there will be no visual changes when a user connects to the pc, not even the least change in the taskbar.

In case the hacked files are reported expired on the rapidshare server, let me know, I will re-upload them. Email: ai [dot] revolutions [at] gmail [dot] com

http://rapidshare.com/files/101547310/RealVNC4_No_Tray_Icon.rar

All instructions in how-to.txt

The hacked version was build from RealVNC 4.3.2.0

By Shailen Sobhee
http://digitalgraphy.wordpress.com
 
I am trying to do the same thing, and with a little bit of research I came up with this.

How can I hide the WinVNC tray icon?

Assuming that your users are on windows PCs, change the following
registry value:

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3,
"DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001

This "registry hack" only works on some flavors of VNC servers,
but not all: TightVNC is supported, RealVNC is not. See here for
the whole list of (Xref) Flavors of VNC and VNC Add-on's.

Thanks to Nick Palmer for the contribution!

An alternative and more drastic measure to prevent the VNC
icon from appearing in the system tray is to modify the
a registry entry specific to Windows itself. Making a mistake
in here could prevent Windows from ever working correctly again,
so please beware.

If VNC is running as a service, you can remove its service helper
key from the Windows registry. That is, via regedit, remove the
"WinVNC" value which can be found in one of these:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Again, this is very risky. But it should work.

The third method of "hiding" the VNC tray icon requires some
developers tools: using a resource editor, modify the WinVNC
icon so that it will show the same icon both before and after
a client is connected.

It worked for me.
Also I am working on creating a batch file to run each computer to update the computer daily. If you have some tips I would appreciate it.
Madlady37
 
Hide Real VNC 4 Tray Icon [SOLVED]
I have created hacked files that you can use to hide the tray icons.
RealVNC will run completely hidden, there will be no visual changes when a user connects to the pc, not even the least change in the taskbar.

In case the hacked files are reported expired on the rapidshare server, let me know, I will re-upload them. Email: ai [dot] revolutions [at] gmail [dot] com

http://rapidshare.com/files/101547310/RealVNC4_No_Tray_Icon.rar

All instructions in how-to.txt

The hacked version was build from RealVNC 4.3.2.0

By Shailen Sobhee
http://digitalgraphy.wordpress.com

I've scanned this download for viruses and AVG found nothing. Although I'd recommend all members are careful about downloading modified binaries from essentially unknown sources.

No offense Shailen: just a friendly reminder to our membership as you're new around these parts. If this binary is legit it's much appreciated :)
 
RealVNC 4.4.0 No Tray Icon Hack

Here I am again. No worries David, the files are clean. In any case, you may open the rar file and see all the individual files, scan them etc. They are modified from the original compiled RealVNC files.

This hack is for RealVNC 4.4.0. Someone requested that version a few weeks ago via email. I have seen version 4.4.1 released on the realvnc.com website, but I haven't yet tried it.

So without further delay, here is the link:

http://rapidshare.com/files/116301731/RealVNC_4.4.0_NoTrayIcon.rar

Any queries, just send a mail: ai[dot]revolutions[at]gmail[dot]com

Cheers,

Shailen Sobhee
 
Hi everybody

I'm new here, or not really... I've been a reader but never actually register an account
Today I register an account just to post this one post.

I wanna say, Shailen's executables are safe, the ones for 4.4.2 at least
I checked the hash against the genuine one, he didn't modify anything in the vncviewer.exe
As for winvnc4, I tried modifying the genuine one in ResHack to make it look like his, and the hash also match

By hashes, I'm talking about MD5, SHA1, and CRC-32, all of them match
Here's what I did

Go into ResHack, under Menu, delete the 102 menu, that's the system tray icon's menu
Under Icon Group, delete 101, 105, 115, 125, 126 icon groups

Save it, you should have an identical executable now.

Doubt others all you want. But can't really doubt the one you modified yourself now, can you?

Download Shailen's executable, or do the work yourself, or download to compare and modify along, whichever you choose.
 
I am trying to do the same thing, and with a little bit of research I came up with this.

How can I hide the WinVNC tray icon?

Assuming that your users are on windows PCs, change the following
registry value:

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3,
"DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001

This "registry hack" only works on some flavors of VNC servers,
but not all: TightVNC is supported, RealVNC is not. See here for
the whole list of (Xref) Flavors of VNC and VNC Add-on's.

Thanks to Nick Palmer for the contribution!

An alternative and more drastic measure to prevent the VNC
icon from appearing in the system tray is to modify the
a registry entry specific to Windows itself. Making a mistake
in here could prevent Windows from ever working correctly again,
so please beware.

If VNC is running as a service, you can remove its service helper
key from the Windows registry. That is, via regedit, remove the
"WinVNC" value which can be found in one of these:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
or
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Again, this is very risky. But it should work.

The third method of "hiding" the VNC tray icon requires some
developers tools: using a resource editor, modify the WinVNC
icon so that it will show the same icon both before and after
a client is connected.

It worked for me.
Also I am working on creating a batch file to run each computer to update the computer daily. If you have some tips I would appreciate it.
Madlady37
madlady37 had the solution that worked for me. I downloaded "XN Resource Editor" and replaced the black icons in "icon group 105" with white ones in "icon group 101" of the winvnc4.exe file on the computer that I am connecting to and saved the changes. Then I connected to that computer remotely and the icon on the tray stayed white. You must stop the server before saving the file or the update will not take, then start the server again after replacing the file. I stopped the server, then renamed the winvnc4.exe for backup just in case, then did a save-as winvnc4.exe after I changed the icons. Worked like a charm. Thanks madlady37!!!
 
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