XP/Vista:

Recently I used a tool called nLite to trim down a Windows XP installation and stream in drivers for all of the hardware in a particular customer’s inventory. nLite is a tool that lets you customize which parts of Windows are included in the install so you can deploy just the parts you need. Example: Your customers don’t need the Windows XP tour which is (STILL!) inexplicably the default in Windows XP nearly nine-years after initial release. If it was irritating in 2002, you can bet its infuriating now. I’m sure there’s probably a technical justification better than that, but that’s the one I’m going with for this particular moment. It also does give you the practical benefit of adding extra drivers to the default Windows XP install–no more “Unknown Devices” after installation if you play your cards right, and also permits the creation of an answer file to allow unattended install of Windows XP. If this sounds cool to you, but you’re on Vista, take heart–they’ve started work on vLite, which as you might have guessed supports trimming down Vista installs.

One of the settings you can manipulate is default-mouse button orientation for new user-profiles, and also the WINLOGON environments mouse-behavior.

Apparently, I must-have clicked the “Default users to left-hand mouse” setting (which is in there) because the left-hand mouse is now switched by default for all new-users, and in the login screen.

So, in other words, the problem is: When users login, to click “Okay” in the Winlogon screen (or to select a user in the “Windows Welcome” screen) they have to click the RIGHT-mouse button. Not a fatal flaw, but irritating, and something that needs to be fixed.

Obviously, I went back and corrected my baseline install media to default users to a “right-handed” mouse configuration. But what to do about the two workstations showing this behavior? Switching the mouse orientation while logged into Windows as an admin only affected that particular user-profile: When you log back out the mouse returns to “left-handed” mode.

After a couple Google searches it was clear… there isn’t anyway to change Winlogon’s mouse-behavior in the GUI. My next stop was REGEDIT!

Below, you’ll find the steps I took to solve this problem. As with all registry edits, proceed with caution, and make sure you know what you’re doing before you do it–making a wrong move in the registry can utterly bork your Windows installation.

CHANGING MOUSE BEHAVIOR IN WINLOGON:

1. XP: Click Start > Run and type regedit.
Vista: Click Start, type regedit and open the Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Mouse and set SwapMouseButtons to “0″ for right-handed mouse, or “1″ for left-handed.

This will also change what orientation a newly created user profile’s mouse will default to (“0″ for righty, “1″ for lefty) on initial login. There is also a key for each individual user, under HKEY_USERS\user’s SID\Control Panel\Mouse, but you should only use that key if changing mouse orientation through the GUI (Start -> Control Panel (Classic View) -> Mouse) doesn’t work for you.