Q At our office, people sometimes work on a computer running Windows 95 without knowing who they're logged on to the network as. Is there a simple way to identify the current logged-on user on the taskbar?

A That would be an obvious convenience in any situation where people share a PC. But no one, to my knowledge, offers a program to do this. We'll just have to be clever ourselves.

We could assign each person a distinct wallpaper, but people don't like to be told how to decorate their desktop. So let's get the name on the taskbar as you requested.

Select StartûSettingsûControl Panel, and double-click the Passwords icon. Click the User Profiles tab in the Password Properties dialogue box, and then select the option that begins Users can customize their preferences and desktop settings. Make sure the Include Start Menu and Program groups in user settings option is checked. (By the way, if you go the wallpaper route, you should also make sure that Include desktop icons and Network Neighborhood contents in user settings is checked. That way, every user can select his or her own wallpaper.) Click OK.

Next, do the following for everyone who logs on to that PC.

1. Use Notepad to create a batch file called username.bat, where username is the user's name (for me, it would be Lincoln.bat). The batch file needs to contain only one word, pause. Store the batch file in an out-of-the-way place.

2. Go to the user's StartUp folder (located at c:\Windows\Profiles\username\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp), and create a shortcut to that batch file. The easiest way to accomplish this is to right-drag the batch file to the StartUp folder, and then select Create Shortcut(s) Here from the options in the pop-up menu.

3. Right-click the shortcut and select Properties. In the Run field of the resulting dialogue box's Program tab, select Minimized. On the Misc tab, uncheck Warn if still active. Finally, click OK.

(arrows as per USPCW, Aug 98, p276)

Caption: Put the current user's name on the Taskbar (A) with a short batch file (B) and a Shortcut in the user's StartUp folder (C). Stop the warning (D) in the Shortcut's Properties box

From now on, every time a user logs on, his or her name will appear on the taskbar as a running program. I guess we don't need freeware for this after all.