On a mailing list I subscribe to, there was an interesting question, “How do you change the user information shown in the Visual Studio splash screen?” I’ve circled in red the user information below.
As I was curious about the same thing because my copy of Visual Studio shows that my company name is Microsoft, and it would be nice to say Wintellect instead. I don’t remember the Visual Studio installation having a field for setting the company name so I figured the information had to be in the registry somewhere and it would be a simple string value.
Searching for “John Robbins” or “Microsoft” under HKLMSoftwareWow6432NodeMicrosoftVisualStudio in the registry editor didn’t find any hits. Note that I’m running an x64 operating system, so if you are on 32-bit, you won’t have the “Wow6432Node” in your registry key. That was odd that those names did not exist, so I ran Process Monitor and set it up to look for just “DEVENV.EXE” and registry accesses. It turned out to be the obvious registry key, HKLMSoftwareWow6432NoneMicrosoftVisualStudio9.0SplashInfo, and the value is SplashInfo.
Interestingly, the SplashInfo value is a REG_BINARY, which means the data is in binary form. Looking at the data it’s obvious that the data is some structure containing all the UNICODE strings for the splash screen except the list of packages along the right hand side.
If you’re feeling brave, you can edit the strings in the registry editor dialog. I take no responsibility for dead copies of Visual Studio, hard feelings, or melancholy caused in your pet turtle.