Snapped this at the food court in the Great Northern Mall near Cleveland Ohio.

 Hmm... Kinda looks like the real problem is that the kiosk isn't running whatever it's supposed to, and BGInfo is there so a tech working on the machine will know what its status is. Not sure what would cause the template to disappear, though... A couple of shots in the dark would be that there's a single hardware failure that toasted the normal app and broke the bginfo file, or that something caused the machine to boot into an abnormal state (power loss followed by default safemode boot?) which both failed to run the usual app and caused BGInfo to look in the wrong place for its config... Of course, in that case, why would the old desktop BGInfo created still be loading?

That'd be interesting to poke at.

The WTF to me is it appears the BGInfo is in the startup script and is likely blocking the execution of the KIOSK software because it is waiting for this dialog. The BGInfo information isn't useful or necessary unless the system is being serviced and in that case could be started under a service account or on demand.

jreasons68:

...The BGInfo information isn't useful or necessary unless the system is being serviced ....

 

You can get BGInfo to write its profile data into a local or remote DB - potentially a way to do an automated census of the all the configs in the organisational area (whatever) - especially useful after someone has been screwing with the PC/kiosk.

 

GreyWolf:

jreasons68:

...The BGInfo information isn't useful or necessary unless the system is being serviced ....

 

You can get BGInfo to write its profile data into a local or remote DB - potentially a way to do an automated census of the all the configs in the organisational area (whatever) - especially useful after someone has been screwing with the PC/kiosk.

 

I think there is a simplier reason for this. BGInfo tries to write the new desktop bitmap to the %WINDIR% directory - and that is a read-only directory for a non-admin account. I get this error on test machines occasionally whenever I have not added an "If not admin then don't launch BGInfo" check to my logon scripts.

 It must be an Ohio thing. I took these pictures at the Eastwood Mall in Niles, Ohio a few weeks ago. As of yesterday, the kiosks still look like this.

Maybe a virus infected the file? Of course, they would never know if that happened because the box isn't running antivirus...

 

 Funny thing, I once worked on a kiosk project with a guy who inexplicably pronounced it "koisk" (ko-isk). We waited until D-day to correct him.