The following article appeared in the January 16, 1995 issue of Infoworld:

               INFOWORLD's WINDOW MANAGER - by BRIAN LIVINGSTON

               Change your .INI settings before Windows starts

I  announced  last  week that Tessler's Nifty Tools (TNT),  a  small  software 
company  in  San  Ramon, Calif., has released a utility  called  WrapUp.  This 
program  allows  you to define a ShutDown group in your shell, much  like  the 
StartUp  group. Any icons you define in your ShutDown group will  be  executed 
when Windows exits. This allows you to automate procedures such as logging out 
of  your  network,  backing  up your files  when  no  other  applications  are 
running,and I so on.

Combining  this shutdown procedure with two other TNT utilities, however,  can 
give you even greater control over your Windows configuration.

The  first  utility is called Config-Controller. This tiny app  gives  you  an 
automated  editor for .INI files, or any plain text file. You define a set  of 
operations you wish to perform on the text file, then run these operations  in 
your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Although Config-Controller is a DOS program, its  main 
purpose  is controlling Windows, because Windows configuration files  must  be 
changed before the graphical environment starts.

One of the most common Windows problems is the dilemma faced by users who need 
two or more configurations. When a PC is used by different office workers  -or 
by parents and their children -you often need to change the configuration that 
some of the users see.

In the case of the children using Windows, for example, you might want them to 
see  only  the  Games  group in Program Manager,  and  not  the  other  groups 
containing icons for File Manager, PC Tools, and other powerful programs.

Instead  of  creating two PROGMAN.INI or WIN.INI files to hold  two  different 
configurations,  a  much better method is to use Config-Controller.  With  two 
sets of .INI files, changes made by the installation routines of new  software 
are  written  to only one set. With Config-Controller, you merely edit  in  or 
edit out those lines you want to appear or not appear. The simplest way to  do 
this  is  to turn individual lines in an .INI file into comments by  adding  a 
semicolon (;) as the first character. Among other commands,  Config-Controller 
includes COMMENT and UNCOMMENT commands that make this easy.

I  last  wrote  about Config-Controller in my April  11,  1994,  column.  (See 
"Control  Your  configuration with these nifty tools," page 30.) But  at  that 
time,  the program was limited by its inability to edit Program Manager  group 
(.GRP)  files.  You could make whole groups appear or disappear  in  different 
configurations by editing PROGMAN.INI, where these groups are listed by  name. 
But  since .GRP files are binary files, not text files, you couldn't  edit  or 
remove individual icons from groups.

Gary  Tessler, the author of the TNT set (which now includes more than 30  DOS 
and  Windows utilities), has cracked the .GRP code and made it  accessible  to 
ordinary  mortals.  He has invented a Group-to-Ini  (Grp2Ini)  utility,  which 
converts  .GRP  files  into text files, like .INI files.  A  separate  utility 
converts them back. This is not an easy feat, because the .GRP format contains 
binary data, which is poorly documented at best.

Converting  .GRP  files into plain text files, of course, makes them  easy  to 
edit  with  Config-Controller. You might want to make  certain  network  icons 
appear  only when the network is running, for instance -or any of a number  of 
other possibilities.