StartPE

A free, open-source (GPLv3) taskbar, start menu, and desktop for Windows PE.

StartPE runs alongside Explorer instead of injecting into it: it draws its own taskbar/start menu/desktop with plain GDI and documented Win32, and hides Explorer's own taskbar. The core is a single self-contained startpe.exe (~520 KB, no runtime dependencies, x64-only); an optional suite of GTK4/Libadwaita helper apps (start menu, Run, Settings, System Information) rides on top for a modern look where the shared GTK runtime is present, with the built-in GDI windows always available as the fallback.

Status

Usable. StartPE is an open source alternative to StartAllBack for PE environments. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the design and the roadmap (theming, a clock calendar flyout, and more customization).

Features

Taskbar

• Bottom-docked appbar that reserves its strip in the work area itself (SPI_SETWORKAREA — the shell's appbar reservation doesn't function on stripped PEs), so maximized windows land above the bar. Hides Explorer's Win11 taskbar and keeps it hidden while running; restores it (and the work area) on clean exit.
• Centered (Windows 11 style) or left-aligned button cluster (CenterTaskbar).
• Rounded, double-buffered GDI buttons; icon-only by default with same-app combining (click cycles the app's windows), or per-window buttons and text labels (TaskbarCombine / TaskbarLabels).
• Instant updates: new/closed windows appear and disappear immediately (WinEvent hook), with the shell hook and a slow watchdog as backstops.
• Hover peek: previews of every window in a group with per-window close buttons — live DWM thumbnails where composition exists, icon + title rows in plain PE.
• Recolorable Start button glyph (StartButtonColor), a show-desktop button, and a locale-formatted clock with date.
• Pinned apps from the winrx-creator/PhoenixPE PinUtil.ini — shown even when not running, and launched on click.
• High-resolution app icons, cloaked/phantom UWP hosts filtered out, UWP windows grouped and icon'd via their real app process.

Start menu

Two start menus ship; both float above the taskbar and follow its alignment.

• GTK menu (StartMenu.exe, the default when present) — a GTK4/Libadwaita two-pane menu, pre-warmed hidden at startup so the Win key opens it instantly. Left pane: a pinned view from PinUtil.ini (32px icons, classic start-menu sizing) with an "All apps ›" toggle that slides the full program list in from the right ("‹ Back" slides the pins back in), folder drill-down, and a search box at the bottom. Right pane: user avatar (UserPicture), Downloads / This PC / Control Panel / Terminal links, Run…, and a Power flyout (Restart / Shut down).
• Built-in GDI menu — the same two-pane layout drawn with plain GDI (rounded via window regions, no DWM needed): Start Menu folders with shell icons and drill-down, pinned view, live search with Enter-launches-top-hit, full keyboard navigation, and the same right-pane links. Always available; used automatically when the GTK helper or runtime is absent.

System tray

• StartPE hosts Shell_NotifyIcon registrations itself (its own Shell_TrayWnd, TaskbarCreated broadcast on startup, repeated a few times over the first seconds to catch apps launched alongside it), draws the icons next to the clock, and forwards left/right clicks to the owning apps. Appbar traffic is proxied to Explorer's tray, and NIM traffic mirrored, so Explorer stays consistent.

Settings

• Right-click the taskbar → Settings: a GTK4/Libadwaita settings app (Settings.exe) when present — grouped switches plus a Start button color picker, applied live via a registered message to the running shell — or the built-in dark, owner-drawn GDI pane with the same options.

Networking

• A built-in network status glyph next to the clock — wireframe globe when nothing is connected, a wifi symbol on wireless, an ethernet symbol on wired (ethernet wins when both are up) — polled via documented GetAdaptersAddresses (ShowNetworkIcon, opt-out).
• Clicking it opens the GTK4/Libadwaita wifi flyout (Network.exe), Windows 11-style: available networks with signal strength, inline security-key entry on the network you pick, and a live status line while it connects (needs the WinPE WLAN stack — wlansvc + wifi drivers — in the image; degrades to status-only without it).
• Network settings… at the flyout's bottom (or right-clicking the glyph) opens the full Network Settings window: per-adapter DHCP/static IPv4 + DNS, and export/import of the whole setup — adapter config plus saved wireless networks (keys included) — as a network-profile.ini dropped next to startpe.exe, applied automatically at shell startup (bake one into the PE image the same way as desktop-layout.txt).

Window switching & hotkeys

• Accent border on the active window (WindowBorders, opt-out) — a thin frame in the Start-button accent color around the foreground window. With DWM it recolors the real window border (DWMWA_BORDER_COLOR); in plain WinPE a click-through GDI overlay follows the window via SetWinEventHook.
• Windows 11-style Alt+Tab switcher: a centered overlay grid of PrintWindow screenshots (no DWM dependency); minimized windows show their app icon.
• The Win key opens the StartPE menu; Win+R (Run), Win+E (file manager), Win+D (show desktop), Win+X (power-user menu), and Win+Pause (System Information) are handled directly (other Win combos pass through).
• A Windows 11-style power-user menu (Win+X, or right-click the start button): Event Viewer, System, Device Manager, Disk Management, Computer Management, Terminal, Task Manager, File Explorer, Run, a Shut down / Restart flyout, and Desktop — the PE-relevant subset of the Windows 11 menu, drawn as a rounded dark custom popup with hover/keyboard navigation and access keys.
• Terminal everywhere honors TerminalApp: the Win+X Terminal entry and both start menus' Terminal link launch the configured terminal (falling back to %ComSpec%, then cmd.exe) — set the registry value from your terminal's PE component and every surface opens it.

Dark theming

• Dark, rounded, custom-drawn popup menus (taskbar context menu, power flyout, Win+X menu) — rounded corners without DWM, correct separator behavior.
• Dark-mode for the shell-rendered menus StartPE raises (chiefly the hosted desktop's right-click menu) via uxtheme app mode (DarkMenus, opt-out).
• A dark Run box — the GTK RunBox.exe when present, else a fully owner-drawn GDI replacement for the shell Run box that's actually dark in PE, both with history recall and Browse.
• A dark System Information window — the GTK SystemInfo.exe when present, else the built-in hardware-first GDI replacement for msinfo32 / sysdm.cpl (System, CPU & memory, graphics & displays, storage & network; WMI with documented fallbacks). Opens from Win+X → System, Win+Pause, and right-click This PC → Properties (the PE image redirects the System Properties verb to startpe.exe --sysinfo).

Desktop (when Explorer can't provide one)

On Win11 24H2/25H2 PE sources, Explorer's modern taskbar init fail-fasts and the desktop (Progman/SHELLDLL_DefView) is never created. When StartPE detects this it provides the desktop itself (OwnDesktop): a Progman-style window painting the wallpaper (BMP/PNG/JPG via GDI+) and hosting a real shell icon view of the Public Desktop — with working right-click menus, double-click, Windows-style ghost icon drag (multi-select drags as a group, snapped to the grid on drop), keyboard shortcuts (Delete, F2 rename, F5, Ctrl+C/X/V/A…), and layout save/restore to desktop-layout.txt. On a normal box (or a PE where Explorer's desktop appears) it detects that and stays out of the way.

Two small companions ship alongside:

• startpe_loader.dll — COM-registered so Explorer loads it early and its shell thread survives the Win11 taskbar init; the one component permitted to touch Explorer internals (startpe.exe itself stays documented Win32).
• syslaunch.exe — runs a program as SYSTEM on the interactive session's desktop, so a DWM-composited PE (Administrator auto-login) can still run StartPE with SYSTEM privileges (LaunchAsSystem).

Configuration

Read once at startup from HKLM\Software\StartPE, then overlaid by HKCU\Software\StartPE. PE runs the shell as SYSTEM, so a PEBakery build writes config machine-wide into the offline SOFTWARE hive; the settings app writes runtime changes to HKCU. See the value table in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Building

cargo build --release --workspace   # x64: startpe.exe + startpe_loader.dll + syslaunch.exe

The GTK helpers under helpers/ (StartMenu.exe, RunBox.exe, Settings.exe, SystemInfo.exe, Network.exe) are excluded from the MSVC workspace; release binaries are built by CI with the MSYS2 ucrt64 toolchain and attached to the same GitHub release. startpe.exe auto-detects them as siblings at runtime — no helper, no GTK dependency.

Testing on a full Windows machine

StartPE hides the real Explorer taskbar and grabs the Win key while it runs. It restores both on clean exit, but a force-kill skips that (recover by restarting explorer.exe). A Windows 11 VM or a PE VM is strongly recommended — behavior differs between full Windows (DWM, UWP windows) and PE (neither).

PE integration

pebakery/StartPE.script copies the binaries into the image and writes the launch and configuration registry values into the mounted SOFTWARE hive at build time. It's modeled on PhoenixPE scripts but can be modified to work in any PEBakery build.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.