Windows – What scripting language do you use for your logon scripts in your Windows enviroment

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

With UAC enabled you cannot map drives in a logon script that is assigned using a Group Policy Object (GPO). The GPO logon script does run, but under a different security context, so the mappings get lost.

Microsoft provides a sample script, called launchapp.wsf that works around this problem by running your real logon script a moment later under the correct security context.

It is available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766208(WS.10).aspx

Look for the section titled “Group Policy Scripts can fail due to User Account Control” and also Appendix A, which is the source code for launchapp.wsf.

launchapp.wsf does fix the problem of mapping drives on Vista (and Windows 7) PCs that have UAC enabled. However, it causes another problem: it doesn't work in Windows XP, so XP computers show an error instead of running the logon script.

Fortunately XP computers don't need the launchapp hack, so my company made a modified version of launchapp that tries to do things the Vista way, but if that fails (because you're running XP), it just launches the real logon script straightaway. I can’t share this with you as it’s internal to my company (has real server names etc.) but it wasn’t too hard to do.