More interesting. I get the behavior described, when using a shortcut to
cmd.exe on my desktop, and the shortcut that appears in the recently used
menu - these two act the same. But a command window launched from All
Programs/Accessories or by entering cmd at the run or search prompts opens
with the settings given in the Defaults setting of the command window's
context menu.

Val
(goes back to pulling out what little hair is left!)



~~

From: "John C. Frickson"
Subject: Command Prompt Properties
Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007 7:01 PM

The other day, I started a command-line program. Turns out it was going
to take quite a while to finish. So I did my usual "alt+space, p" to
bring up properties, ctrl+tab to the Fonts tab, pick a small font,
ctrl+tab to the Layout tab, and set the window size to 2 rows high, and
30 columns wide, hit enter, move the window to a corner of the screen
so I can monitor progress.

Then I bring up another command prompt, and am I surprised that it's
got a small font and is 30x2!

What happened to the prompt to "Apply properties to current window only"
or "Modify shortcut that started this window"? It seems like Vista now
assumes you always want to make any changes the default.

Is there any way to get the old pre-Vista behavior back?

"Val" <vmanes@NOSPAMrap.midco.net> wrote ...
> More interesting. I get the behavior described, when using a shortcut to
> cmd.exe on my desktop, and the shortcut that appears in the recently used
> menu - these two act the same. But a command window launched from All
> Programs/Accessories or by entering cmd at the run or search prompts opens
> with the settings given in the Defaults setting of the command window's
> context menu.

Yep, that's correct. If you lauch CMD.EXE from the "Run" line, it takes its
seetings from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console (and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console).

When you change the "Default" settings on a Console window, it updates
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console. When you update the "Properties" on a Console
window, it updates the *.lnk file which was used to launch CMD.EXE.

If CMD.EXE was launched from the command line (or Run) the Properties seems
to update the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console settings, same as Default.

But there's definitely different behaviour, when CMD is just "run"; compared
to when it is launched from a shortcut.

Still digging for more info ... :-)

--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au