We are installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 and have written a small
script to deal with how XP will behave after the XPSP2 has installed.

Everything is working fine appart from the fact every time a (new or
old) user logs on for the first time they receive a Windows Security
Status message. We would like to remove this.

We have unticked the boxes in 'Change the way Security Center alerts
me', ie the 3 tick boxes for AV, AU & Firewall and we do not receive
messages saying you do not have your Firewall switched on, etc however
the Windows Security Status Window appears only once when a user, be it
new or old, logs on.

We have set group policies to control the firewall and to turn off
automatic updates. We have 400 computer in a Novell environment so we
do not use Active Directory.

I have read disabling the wscsvc service would work but then this seems
to be a big change just to remove this one security status window.

Please any suggestions would be very helpful.

http://www.codeproject.com/w2k/Antifirewall.asp?df=100&forumid=145129&exp=0&select...

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Replid to [oli]s message :

I don't think that it will be a major change if you turn off the Security
Centre service. Security Centre just check the Status Of the "Automatic
Updates", "Firewall" and "Anti-Virus" and if any of them is turn off or not
updated (like Anti Virus) then it just start display the message "Your
computer might be at risk". Nothing else.

According to me, there is nothing worry about as I always turn it off
because if everything is perfect then it still start displaying the message
because Virus defination of the Anti-Virus software is not update.

Hope this help, let us know!

"oli" wrote:

I tend to agree and most probably will take this route.

If the service is disabled and the user has restricted access to start
the service, that should be adequate. All I can see with regards to the
benefits of having the the status window appear is to tell you what you
have / have not got in regards to AV, AU etc

I suppose my real question was that there has to be a flag set to 'run
once' for each user to notify the status of the security of that
machine. In our environment we have AV installed and will control the
AU and firewall via group policy so the status is irrelevant. That flag
must be a reg file and I wouldn't mind knowing how to find that.... We
use a snapshot tool to find out what changes on machines, ie reg file
ini file shortcuts etc but not sure how this would help?

I also read that doc sent in the first post and have done a fair amount
of research on this behaviour and have yet to find out how to stop that
status window appearing for each user that logs on!

any other ideas?

This is what you want:

You want Service Center to do is display the alerts once.
Later, user may able to ignore them forever or set them as per requirement.

Here, how you can set the Alerts behavior?

Security Center service must be running and should set to Automatic.

In my case, I am running the Security Center service and it never prompts me
for risks because I have Firewall and Automatic Updates ON and I am running
Norton Antivirus 2003. But if you have the same configuration then it will
start alerting you.

There could be 2 reasons:

1. Security Center is monitoring the status of your Anti-Virus.
2. Your Virus Defination is not up to date.

What I always do is:

Update my virus defination

or

if I am unable to do is then make a check mark on "I have an antivirus
program that I'll monitor myself.....". This option is available in Security
Center by clicking on Recommendation button.

hey thanks for you replies here...

Actually no, I dont want any service center alerts at all so I will be
stopping the wscsvr service during install using a script and setting
the reg value for that service - fairly easi and trivial

let me explain a little

we are a medium sized law firm and users do not like to be asked
questions or have pop ups so we diasble and lock down everything we do
not want to run

the idea was to keep WSC service running but not alert so I 'unchecked'
the 3 boxes where it says "Change the way Security Center Alerts Me.",
but the status window pops up once and only once everytime a new or old
user logs onto that machine - this doesnt comply with our way off
'stopping the users phoning helpdesk when something alerts them'

i'm therfore entering the following regkey

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wscsvc]
"Start"=dword:00000004

This will work and I took on board what you said about disabling the
service