RG024 – Secrets of PWRGATE.EXE

For years pwrgate.exe, an integral part of PowerFuse has had the ability to launch pretty much everything else. This is very usefull for creating customized startmenus and offering certain users special capabilities straight off the startmenu.

A good example of such, would be the ability to launch the User Installed Appliation Wizard (formerly known as the Partially Managed Workstation wizard). Many users and admins did not like the fact that you had to go through the Workspace Preferences/Powerpanel in order to start it from the tab named Other.

The basic idea is that you create a new managed PowerFuse application, where the commandline is %programfiles%\res powerfuse\pwrgate <AppID>.  Now it’s quite obvious that this AppID number here is the secret sauce. Note that it’s an integer, which means the number can be both positive and negative. I got curious to what else it might do, so I set off launching pwrgate systematically with a lot of integers to find out what’s there, besides what’s currently listed in the existing KB article Q201579.

Pwrgate.exe is also responsible for launching every managed shortcut you create. If you check the properties on any shortcut in a PowerFuse controlled startmenu, you will see something like this here on the right. That value actually corresponds to an AppID assigned to the application uppon creation.

You can get an overview of all the AppID’s for all the regular applications you’ve created and/or imported into your environment. Just go to the Composition|Applications|Managed Applications and select the Application list tab like shown here:

Besides the visible AppID’s, there are a number of hidden applications, part of PowerFuse which you can launch this way. Below is a handy little reference to what pwrgate.exe can do in PowerFuse 9.0.0.0 aka 2010:

AppID    Function
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 15      Launch the Printing Preferences panel
 14      Launch the Explorer's Run dialogue and refresh session
  8      Launch the Workspace Preferences panel
  7      Launch the PowerFuse Management Console
  6      Launch the Access Wizard (for delegation)
  5*     ? + Refresh (tries to launch a commandline 0 that doesn't exist)
  4*     ? + Refresh (tries to launch a commandline 0 that doesn't exist)
  3      Launch the PowerHelp panel
  2      Launch the WorkSpace Preferences panel (unknown diff from 2)
 -2      Force a Refresh of the session
 -3      Logoff
-15      Launch the Restore UserSettings wizard
-16      Launch the User Installed Application wizard

* These may possibly be reserved for future use.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, if you want to avoid creating all of the working shortcuts above, you can  just download the BuildingBlock below. This will give you a nice set of predefined applications as shown here on the right. Note all apps are set to All Users access per default, but they are harmless as the user won’t be able to start anything he’s not allowed to.

Click here to download:

RESguru | datetime 2010/03/05 03:55

3 Comments

  • By Patrik, 2010/03/13 @ 08:50

    You’re the man :-)

  • By Dennis Persson, 2010/03/17 @ 15:29

    Really cool, I will try these out.

  • By Frode, 2010/04/17 @ 17:12

    Once again… thanks for all your effort.. this saves me and everyone else a lot of time !!

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