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In Windows 10, the default shell is explorer.exe, giving you the taskbar, desktop icons and start menu.

Since Windows 10 v1909, and possibly v1903, Microsoft has decided to use the hyper key (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-WIN) plus a few keys, the default key for Office applications without allowing users who do not have office installed, use these keys for their own leisure.

I had these keys bound to actions in various programs, but now every one of these keys opens a page in my webbrowser navigating to office365, which I don't use, or, in the case of O for OneDrive, giving me an error message because I don't have OneDrive installed.

There should be the ability to make it open nothing when you press the button, using a registry tweak, but in Windows 10 v1909, that does not work anymore.

I need to get rid of this behavior, so I did some research:

It appears that Microsoft built this support directly into explorer.exe; I can kill explorer.exe and the hotkeys are finally gone, but when I start explorer.exe, they come back.

It appears that on startup of explorer.exe, these keys are registered once, and if the registration of the keys fails, Explorer will not try again. This essentially means that in order to get my hotkeys back, I need to kill Explorer, restart the apps that use these hotkeys, then start Explorer. It is even possible to kill explorer, start an app that registers all the office hotkeys, start Explorer, then unregister the office hotkeys and they are entirely free from that moment on.

Given that for me I just have one program that uses all these global hotkeys, all I need to do is start this program before I start Explorer and I'll be fine.

I could of course run a script that kills Explorer, starts my program, then starts Explorer, but given that this will run at system start anyway, having Explorer flash as a result can be avoided if I can start my startup script instead of Explorer, something that can be done by setting an alternate shell. To my knowledge, however, only .exe files can be set as shell.

Does anyone know how I can set a .cmd file (or other scripting language) as shell, or alternatively, does anyone know of a clean way to solve my global hotkey problem?

EDIT: I am on Windows 10 Pro.

I actually tried to make a VB .net program that would launch explorer.exe after it registered the hotkeys, but can't get it to work reliably. If explorer.exe is not shell, and I start explorer.exe, while it doesn't run, I only get a file browser, not the taskbar etc. If Explorer is the shell, and it starts, killing it by my program aborts the startup sequence, so I have to significantly delay my routine, which means that at some point I get a noticable Explorer restart, which is far from ideal.

I have played with the idea to make my own shell as a replacement for the taskbar and desktop, but given that I use Actual Tools Window Manager, and it relies on Explorer being the shell, that's not really ideal either. So for that reason, this question is still open, although I fear what I'm asking is simply not possible.

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  • Out of curiosity, what would happen if you changed your .cmd script to a .exe or .com extension?
    – JW0914
    Apr 7, 2020 at 4:16
  • @JW0914 My windows would no longer start, or throw in an error or something, because .cmd is not the same as .exe or .com. .cmd is a textfile, .exe and .com are compiled code executing CPU instruction sets.
    – LPChip
    Apr 7, 2020 at 6:27
  • I know the differences between the two file extensions, I was curious if what launches the Windows Shell would execute a script file if the extension was changed to what it expects. If you do choose to create a custom shell, the following will help: Shell Launcher, Windows Shell, and Windows Shell Development,
    – JW0914
    Apr 7, 2020 at 11:25
  • 1
    @JW0914 no, the shell must be an executable, can't be a script file.
    – LPChip
    Apr 7, 2020 at 11:27

3 Answers 3

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Keyboard Filter (WMI Provider Reference)

Supported only in Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education

WEKF_PredefinedKey
This class blocks or unblocks predefined key combinations, such as Ctrl+Alt+Delete

class WEKF_PredefinedKey {
 [Static] uint32 Enable (
   [In] string PredefinedKey<
 );

 [Static] uint32 Disable (
   [In] string PredefinedKey
 );

 [Key] string Id;
 [Read, Write] boolean Enabled;
};

Source: Microsoft Docs

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  • Thanks for the answer. Unfortunately, I am on Windows 10 pro, so this won't work for me.
    – LPChip
    Apr 1, 2020 at 21:11
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I haven't tested this idea, but it seems plausible and straightforward: Instead of replacing Explorer, create a .reg file that deletes or modifies the offensive entries created by Explorer in the Registry. Then create a task in Windows' Task Scheduler that will run the .reg file and be triggered each time you log on to Windows.

For more information, see:
How to Add, Modify, or Delete Registry Subkeys and Values by Using a .reg File

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It's solved here: https://github.com/stringlapse/OfficeKeyFix

You should load visual studio with extension for C++ normal tasks. Create empty project, build it, move to autorun.

It is better to create task at task planner with delay 30 or 60 sec.

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  • Sorry, can't accept or vote this answer up because this is literally in my question that I already tried this and is not the desired behavior. It kills explorer to unregister the keys, which is something I want to avoid.
    – LPChip
    Nov 7, 2021 at 8:15

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