Hide Control Panel items

Helpline Q&A Directory

I want to protect my Control Panel items from being tampered with. Is there some way I could hide them so that they can't be accessed and changed by the kids?

Yes there is, and here's how to do it: first, close Control Panel. Then open your Windows folder and locate the file control.ini. Open it using Notepad by double-clicking it. Look for the section header '[don't load]'. If it doesn't exist, create one.

Under it, enter the names of the Control Panel extensions you want to hide, in the form 'filename=no'. So, for example, to hide the Passwords Control Panel you would enter a line that says 'password.cpl=no' under '[don't load]'.

It isn't always clear from the name which Control Panel extension corresponds to which file. To find out the filename, look in the Windows System folder where the Control Panel extensions live. Right-click a CPL file and select 'Open in Control Panel'. It will then start up in the usual way and you can see what it is. You can use this method to activate Control Panel extensions you've hidden if you occasionally need to run them.

Although the entries in the '[don't load]' section are normally in the form 'filename=no', you can't unhide an icon by changing its entry to 'filename=yes'. If anything at all appears to the right of the equals sign on the line, that extension's icon will be hidden. Therefore, to unhide an icon, change the line to 'filename=' or delete the line altogether.