hermes-windows-startup

Answer "what launches itself on this machine" on Windows: win_startup_table lists every autostart entry across the six Run/RunOnce registry keys (HKCU and HKLM, plus the 32-bit views) and the two Startup folders, with where each one comes from, whether it is machine- or user-scoped, and whether the person switched it off in Task Manager - Explorer's StartupApproved verdict, with the date it was last changed, a state Win32_StartupCommand has no field for; approval records uninstalled programs left behind are reported as leftovers, their unknown state bytes surfaced as-is rather than guessed into verdicts. win_startup_detail takes one entry and resolves its command the way the loader does - quoting, arguments, environment variables, and unquoted paths with spaces resolved by longest existing prefix - and says whether the binary is still on disk, plus a folder file's size and last change. Use it for what added itself since last month, for slimming a slow sign-in, and for a launcher whose program is already gone. Read-only: nothing is enabled, disabled or deleted; the Startup folders are read through Explorer's User Shell Folders values so OneDrive-redirected folders are found. The sweep is registry and directory reads only - about a millisecond for three Run values and two folders on the machine it was written on, no PowerShell, no WMI. The plugin declares no Python dependencies; there is no network call and no file write. Windows only. Disclosure - the tools report program names, launch commands, binary paths under C:\Program Files and C:\Users\<name>, and what the person chose to keep from starting, to the model; treat the output like the Startup tab of the person's own Task Manager.

Yicheng-MarkToolsv0.1.0Updated 44 minutes ago

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hermes-windows-startup

Answer "what launches itself on this machine" on Windows, from inside Hermes.

win_startup_table({"include_disabled": False})
win_startup_table({"scope": "machine"})
win_startup_detail({"name": "CC Switch"})

The Task Manager → Startup tab question, answered without Task Manager: what runs at
sign-in, from which of the six Run/RunOnce keys or the two Startup folders, and — the
part Win32_StartupCommand has no field for — whether the person switched it off, with
the date of that decision.

What the tools report

| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| name, command | The Run value's name and data, or the folder file, verbatim |
| source | One of six registry keys (registry-hkcu-run, registry-hklm-run-32, ...) or folder-user / folder-common |
| scope | user or machine |
| enabled, changed | Explorer's StartupApproved verdict: enabled (02/03), disabled in Task Manager (06/07), with the FILETIME of the last change; an entry with no record runs — that is Windows' default |
| leftover approvals | Records for entries that are gone — uninstalled programs leave them behind; reported, not guessed from |

win_startup_detail adds the resolution of the command: quoting, arguments and
environment variables folded in, the binary the loader would find, and whether it is
still on disk — an uninstalled launcher's Run entry keeps pointing at nothing. Unquoted
commands with spaces in the path (real machines write them) are resolved the way the
loader resolves them: the longest whitespace prefix that names a real file.

Read-only, and why it goes through the registry

Nothing is enabled, disabled or deleted: the tools enumerate, and the schemas say so.

The registry and the two folders answer in about a millisecond on this machine — three
Run entries and two folders — with no PowerShell spawn and no WMI query. Win32_StartupCommand
costs both and cannot answer the switched-off question at all, because Explorer keeps
that verdict in StartupApproved blobs the CIM class never reads.

The StartupApproved record is 12 bytes: a state word whose low byte Explorer writes
(02/03 enabled, 06/07 switched off) and a FILETIME of when it was last changed.
Other bytes occur in the wild — a record an uninstalled program orphaned reads 01 here —
and are reported as unknown with the raw byte, never guessed into a verdict.

Startup folders are read through Explorer's own User Shell Folders values, so a
OneDrive-redirected Startup folder is found where the person actually has it, not where
the default says it should be. desktop.ini is folder customization, not something
anyone launches, and is skipped.

Windows only

The plugin imports nowhere but on Windows: winreg is guarded, and on a machine without
it the tools answer with a clear error instead of crashing. Windows-only is declared in
the manifest.

Testing

python -m pytest tests/ — unit tests fake the registry and the folders, live tests
check the real machine (16 tests on the machine that produced the numbers above:
11 unit + 5 live). VALIDATION.md records the evidence.

README from the reviewed commit a216242; it updates when the author re-pins.

More by Yicheng-Mark

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