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Question refers to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

When I lock my computer I don't want people to be able to mess about with it, so would like the Ease of Access button (in the bottom left corner of the logon screen) to either be removed or disabled.

Does anybody know how to do this?

Thank you for your help :-)

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4 Answers 4

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The following steps will remove the button completely:

  1. Create a backup of your Authui.dll in C:\Windows\System32
  2. Open C:\Windows\System32\Authui.dll in a resource editor (PE Explorer)
  3. Go the the UIFILE folder and double-click the 12400 XAML file
  4. Find this text <if id="atom(Accessibility)">
  5. Delete everything following that text - it should be 46 lines - stop at <if id="atom(ToggleTabletKeyboard)">
  6. Save/close the file and do steps 4 and 5 for the 12401 and 12402 XAML files

If you feel uncomfortable modifying system files, there are also third-party apps that will disable the button.

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Nick's answer will not work; it will crash your login and force you to do a sys restore/hdd pull. That method is only for 32bit operating systems, which OP's clearly is not. To date there is no way of modifying the authui.dll for 64bit OS's. –  user79679 May 4 '11 at 12:50

An easy way to do this is to use Ease of Access Disabler 1.6 from http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Ease-of-Access-disabler.shtml. It should work on both Vista and win7.

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Works in Windows 7. This How-To Geek article explains more. howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/… –  Iain Jan 8 '11 at 17:44

Even if this is a little bit older, I found a way to remove the accessibility button on 64-bit systems.

  2. ListOpen C:\Windows\System32\Authui.dll in a hex editor (like Hex Workshop)
  3. List item
  4. Find this text atom(Accessibility)
  5. Shortly after the text above, you should find a text saying layoutpos="left"
  6. Replace the "left" with "none"
  7. Save authui.dll
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Disable the Ease of Access button

Clicking the button would usually start Utilman.exe, which in turn would display the Ease of Access options. You can override the executable, thus making the button useless.

  1. Open an elevated command prompt.

    reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\Utilman.exe" /v "Debugger" /t REG_SZ /d "systray.exe" /f

    Changes are applied immediately.

How it works


What about systray.exe? It's a little stub program which was first introduced with Windows 95, and used to handle the system notification icons. It's not really used any more in the newer Windows versions, and it was mostly kept for backward compatibility reasons. It has no user interface, and wouldn't do anything noticeable besides refreshing the notification area when started. Anything launched in the logon screen runs under NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM, which has no desktop or taskbar, so nothing will happen.


  • No system file or security permissions tweaking.
  • Future-proof: works even if authui.dll or Utilman.exe get updated.
  • No third party software involved.


  • Although the button won't do anything, it will still be visible/clickable.
  • As a side effect, you won't be able to manually start the Utility Manager (Utilman.exe) elsewhere, nor the Screen Magnifier unless you use the /noutilman switch (e.g. Magnify.exe /noutilman).
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