Blocking & Locking

HMS_RL

Simple problem.. Im a newb remember... I want to lock off certain folders on my computer with a password... I have several Windows deleting virus files disguised as actual programs hidden throughout my computer (reasons for which you don't need to know) and I was wondering if there is a way to lock it off in vb.. I mean obviously.. make a login screen, have the prog run on start-up simple stuff.. but is there a way i can actually tell VB 'don't let them in here!' ?? I have no idea if there is or not.. but counting on the power of the VB language, i'd say there is.. any help would rock thnx...

Jonathan

The problem you're talking about is really an operating system level one, not something there will be a VB command for. If the drive has the FAT32 filesystem on, that doesn't have the concept of file/folder protection. If you've got NTFS there is maybe more hope. It all depends how well you want to hide stuff. You can always set the hidden attribute, but these days it's pretty useless. I have Explorer configured to show hidden files, and if you can configure Windows Explorer to do it, then it's hardly protection.

Other programs that protect directories might try and hook in to the OS somewhere and intercept filesystem access requests from programs. How you do this, I don't know; I haven't done a great deal of Windows programming of late. It'll be hard though, you'll need APIs galore at a guess.

As for "the power of the VB language"...it depends how you define power. Sure, it's quick and easy to work in, but try doing direct memory access or low level stuff in VB. Yeah, yeah, I know, you can do the first with a kernel memory call using an appropriate API. But in C you can attempt to directly access any block of memory. Not that I'm a C expert. :-)

Hope this helps,

Jonathan

###
for(74,117,115,116){$::a.=chr};(($_.='qwertyui')&&
(tr/yuiqwert/her anot/))for($::b);for($::c){$_.=$^X;
/(p.{2}l)/;$_=$1}$::b=~/(..)$/;print("$::a$::b $::c hack$1.");

GideonOmega

Johnathan is right you will definitly need to look into the windows api's, depending on your os. try checking out http://msdn.microsoft.com
you should be able to find out all you want to know about the api's that you will need.