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I am setting up a kiosk/POS computer that runs certain applications from a launcher. I've got everything set up the way I need except for one thing.

I am able to close the launched applications (like Chrome or IE, for example), but I don't want to be able to minimize them because the taskbar is disabled.

How can I go about either completely disabling minimization (or a similar workaround to achieve the above goal)?

Edit: One potential solution I tried was to loop this Powershell script every few seconds or so:

$dllInfo = '[DllImport("user32.dll")] public static extern bool ShowWindowAsync(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);'
Add-Type -MemberDefinition $dllInfo -name NativeMethods -namespace Win32
foreach($proc in Get-Process){
    $hwnd = $proc.MainWindowHandle
    # Restore window
    [Win32.NativeMethods]::ShowWindowAsync($hwnd, 4) | Out-Null
}

But that just resulted in my processor being bogged down to an usuable state. Any other ideas or improvements on this one?

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  • I don't know the details, but my guess is you have a LOT of processes running, and only a few have windows. So, you could cache that list and filter out those that won't have windows (e.g. those that are already running when you start your kiosk). Or, a second after you launch an app, grab its process ID and then watch it.
    – Daniel Griscom
    Jun 14, 2015 at 12:03
  • @DanielGriscom Actually, there aren't too many. Windows is essentially locked down to no taskbar and Rainmeter is running as the end user UI. Rainmeter can launch a couple websites in either chrome or IE, and that's about it. At idle, these are my usage stats: i.imgur.com/038BmGd.png
    – user201262
    Jun 15, 2015 at 3:48
  • But, how many processes does Get-Process return, and how many could you filter it down to?
    – Daniel Griscom
    Jun 15, 2015 at 5:28
  • @DanielGriscom Ah, yes. I didn't think about that. I suppose that's a rather crude way of doing it, I'm not as good with powershell :/
    – user201262
    Jun 16, 2015 at 3:51

1 Answer 1

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There are a number of Windows products that support feature-limiting for kiosks. Auto-restarting, blocking the task bar, window control, preventing use of Explorer, blocking special keystrokes, etc. I've used SiteKiosk in the past, but it's been a while, so I don't know whether it's been surpassed since then.

Some possibly useful links:

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  • I've already settled on a kiosk software, thanks! It's more or less a custom designed shell. It was just this one problem that I needed to conquer via scripting or some other means.
    – user201262
    Jun 14, 2015 at 4:03

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