- May 19, 2011
- 18,284
- 10,794
- 136
A customer wanted me to completely remove an image that had been set as their Windows lock screen (by someone else allegedly, not a Windows Spotlight image); I've never had this request before, so time to learn something new.
Changing the lock screen setting is easy enough through Settings > Personalisation > Lock Screen, but one slightly odd thing is that Windows holds on to the image that had been set so I had to track down where it was being stored.
Searching for this information yielded little in the way of useful information because all the search results were based on Windows Spotlight being enabled, so I pulled out Sysinternals Process Monitor and filtered for filesystem traffic.
I would have thought that custom lock screen images would be somewhere in %appdata% / %localappdata% because that's where spotlight puts it, but no.
The location:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData\<user SID>\ReadOnly\LockScreen_A
To make matters worse, I think it's the SystemData folder that has some truly YOU SHALL NOT PASS! filesystem privileges and even LockScreen_A has custom user privileges set, I ended up taking ownership of the LockScreen_A folder, deleted all the images (all variations on the image that needed to be deleted, it looked like Windows had saved several copies of the same image but with different image dimensions), job done. There was also a LockScreen_Z folder with the Windows default lock screen image in.
I understand that the lock screen image is a per-user setting so it needs to be stored on a per-user basis, but if nothing is wrong with the %localappdata%...localdeliverymanager folder for spotlight image, why do user-set lock screen images have to be outside the user's folder?
I tried a few shortcuts to finding the information I needed like searching the user's folder for jpegs or saving a theme file then reading the contents of the theme file but apparently lock screen prefs aren't stored in the theme file?? Weird.
I just checked my own LockScreen folders (I've got Spotlight enabled in Windows) and it turns out that despite Windows Spotlight data for the lock screen being stored in one place, it does indeed save the current lockscreen image to this LockScreen folder. Nothing like a bit of data duplication!
Surely it would have been simpler to specify a allusers-writable location and store all current lockscreen images in there? Given that one can hardly argue that it's "private" data since anyone can switch on a Windows box, click on any user, not sign in and see that user's current lock screen image...
IMO it's super-cute when Microsoft creates a folder called 'ReadOnly' though; it reminds me of some Microsoft Edge metadata folder that is labelled something like 'DO NOT TOUCH!'... it makes me think of a teenager storing their totally-not-porn in a folder on the desktop... 'KEEP OUT!'
(I can't actually find that Edge folder I mentioned right now, maybe it in was pre-Chromium Edge?)
Changing the lock screen setting is easy enough through Settings > Personalisation > Lock Screen, but one slightly odd thing is that Windows holds on to the image that had been set so I had to track down where it was being stored.
Searching for this information yielded little in the way of useful information because all the search results were based on Windows Spotlight being enabled, so I pulled out Sysinternals Process Monitor and filtered for filesystem traffic.
I would have thought that custom lock screen images would be somewhere in %appdata% / %localappdata% because that's where spotlight puts it, but no.
The location:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData\<user SID>\ReadOnly\LockScreen_A
To make matters worse, I think it's the SystemData folder that has some truly YOU SHALL NOT PASS! filesystem privileges and even LockScreen_A has custom user privileges set, I ended up taking ownership of the LockScreen_A folder, deleted all the images (all variations on the image that needed to be deleted, it looked like Windows had saved several copies of the same image but with different image dimensions), job done. There was also a LockScreen_Z folder with the Windows default lock screen image in.
I understand that the lock screen image is a per-user setting so it needs to be stored on a per-user basis, but if nothing is wrong with the %localappdata%...localdeliverymanager folder for spotlight image, why do user-set lock screen images have to be outside the user's folder?
I tried a few shortcuts to finding the information I needed like searching the user's folder for jpegs or saving a theme file then reading the contents of the theme file but apparently lock screen prefs aren't stored in the theme file?? Weird.
I just checked my own LockScreen folders (I've got Spotlight enabled in Windows) and it turns out that despite Windows Spotlight data for the lock screen being stored in one place, it does indeed save the current lockscreen image to this LockScreen folder. Nothing like a bit of data duplication!
Surely it would have been simpler to specify a allusers-writable location and store all current lockscreen images in there? Given that one can hardly argue that it's "private" data since anyone can switch on a Windows box, click on any user, not sign in and see that user's current lock screen image...
IMO it's super-cute when Microsoft creates a folder called 'ReadOnly' though; it reminds me of some Microsoft Edge metadata folder that is labelled something like 'DO NOT TOUCH!'... it makes me think of a teenager storing their totally-not-porn in a folder on the desktop... 'KEEP OUT!'
(I can't actually find that Edge folder I mentioned right now, maybe it in was pre-Chromium Edge?)
Last edited: