GamesDows Steam Starts As Admin

Steam now starts as administrator. If you have UAC enabled, you will have to press always start as administrator the first time Steam launches, and then you will not receive a prompt again. If you have UAC disabled, Steam will always start as administrator with no further action needed.

Additionally, the Disable Gamesdows.bat script has had fixes applied and now works correctly.

GamesDows V1

Removed the auto login registry key commands as they were causing bugs.

GamesDows V1 with a Playnite Variant

There is now a Playnite variant based on GamesDows V1.

I highly recommend downloading the reg key as well so that in the event there are any issues with explorer starting and you get a black screen when the Desktop is supposed to appear so that explorer.exe does not need to be reset to the shell manually via regedit if any errors occur.

Once explorer has been reset to the shell via the regkey, the Desktop will appear as expected when explorer.exe is run via task manager.

The process to access the Desktop if any errors occur is as follows for clarity:

Open task manager. Launch explorer.exe via task manager once. The file manager window will appear over the black screen. Navigate to the folder that contains the downloaded explorer-as-shell.reg, and then launch it and confirm the addition of the registry key. Then launch explorer.exe a second time via task manager and you'll be back into the desktop.

This version should not have these issues, but the registry key has been included as a precaution.

If anyone has previously used V2 and found it to be nonfunctional, and then run V1 and encountered this issue, there is likely a conflict between the V1 and V2 scheduled tasks, and the scheduled task must be removed in task scheduler after you get back into the Desktop. Once that is done, you should be able to rerun either the Playnite or Steam V1 scripts (this release) and you should be good to go.