Question about desktop toolbars

[kleinma]

I use dual video cards and 4 LCD monitors for my work computer.

I make pretty extensive use of custom toolbars on my desktop. For instance, I drag the quick launch off of the taskbar and place it at the top of my monitor. I also created a "My Computer" toolbar and placed that at the top of another monitor, etc.. In all I have 3 or 4 toolbars at any given time. I dock them and set them to always on top, and everything works great.

My issue/question is this:

When I remote desktop into this machine, I only get 1 monitor of course, so it moves all my toolbars to the single monitor, then when I actually log into the machine, I have to reposition all my toolbars back to their correct places. It is pretty annoying, as I remote to the machine from home a lot.

I figured the actual layout information for these toolbars is either kept in the registry, or in a config file somewhere on the system. What I want to do, is find where these values are stored, so I can cache them, and write a small app to fix the layout programmatically.

So does anyone know where data about your desktop toolbars is stored on the system?

[Hack]

All of the available infor on toolbars that I'm using is under HKEY CLASSES ROOT (including the class ids)

[kleinma]

what about their actual positions on the desktop? That is what I am after. I want to cache those, so that when they do get screwed up via remote desktop, I can run a quick script to put them back where I want them.

Using regmon, it looks like the values gets stored in the subkeys under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop

Yes internet explorer... not sure why, but likely due to the tight integration internet explorer and windows have/had for so long.

However so far no luck in restoring values to get the toolbars how I want them.. still playing around though.

[mendhak]

Use regmon and while it's running, move your toolbars around and see what values are being changed.

[kleinma]

i tried that, but it didn't seem to work... or perhaps this isn't something you can easily do by editing the registry. I filtered to only show reg writes, and the only time I get activity is when I dock/undock a toolbar. Nothing for the actual x/y position when it is freefloating.

Even so, what I did was, export the entire key that showed writes to it while the toolbar was docked. I then undocked the toolbar. I then restored the regkey that had changed, but no effect on the toolbar or its position on the desktop.