techrecovery | And today, on the other side of the fence.

I'm doing some work on gaming kiosks, and we've got a new type of touchscreen in, that works through a sheet of toughened glass. No bezel, doesn't matter if stuff gets dropped or spilt on it, much better for us. The driver for it isn't a driver, it's an app. It gets launched from the startup items in the start menu. Not much use for us as a) we'll be using a custom shell so there won't be a start menu (no need to include all that stuff if you're not using it in XPembedded) and while the actual system runs as a locked-down user there's some admin tasks that can be done by engineers as an administrator, except if you're not logged in, you've got no touchscreen any more. No keyboard or mouse on the unit obviously, so no way to log back in. We had been told that the driver was a service. It would also be handy to set it with a high priority so the automatic update on the box doesn't screw up someone's game because they suddenly can't click. I do know ways round it, but I figure they must have this as a service somewhere, or it'd be of virtually no use.
I emailed the vendor's tech guy and our sales contact about it. I've not heard back yet from the sales guy, but I did get an email from tech support.
'What do you mean run as a service? You want to install it as a user called 'service'? Make the user an Administrator and you can install it. If you can't install it as Administrator you'll have to contact Microsoft, we don't support XPembedded. Also, you can't run a PC without a keyboard on, the BIOS will report an error.' Now this is a company that does a *lot* of business with embedded systems OEMs. I'd mentioned in the email that I'd turned it into a component for XPe without any trouble (on XPe you don't have to have installers and if you're rolling out several thousand boxes you don't want to), and they provide their own XPe component for the older touchscreen we had been using on their web site. I only bothered making this component myself because there's not one on their site and I can get brownie points with MS for making one available for the noobs. Plus I needed to be doing something that looked like work.
I mailed back and explained what a service was and he said he didn't deal with hardware and would forward my mail to the software people. Hopefully Monday I'll hear from someone with a clue.