Have you heard of: ThinLaunch

I can acheive the same effect by replacing the explorer.exe with mstsc.exe, and I can make this change for free.  I can even go further and remove certain parts of mstsc with Resource Hacker, allowing me to customize it even more.  Why would I want to pay $20 for something that I can do for free?

I saw the demo at VMworld. I have beend frustrated for years using the approaches mentioned above. Nick has done an oustanding job with his product. I'm not doing that other stuff any more. Nick - Thanks for the usb drive with the software. I called a friend of mine and told him about Thindesktop he's going to download it from your site.

You can certainly do what you suggested. I have also spent time doing something similar before Thin Desktop - configuring, testing, tweaking, testing, deploying. That's why we created Thin Desktop (www.thinlaunch.com ). The goal has been to make it simple and easy for any user without advanced knowledge of Windows registry, policy, and security settings.

The most difficult problem we believe we solved was that most applications were never designed to become the shell. If the application were to terminate, the user would be stuck without an interface. Thin Desktop solves this by monitoring and automatically re-launching the application in case of termination.

Another advantage is the ease of mass deployment because it is packaged  into an MSI file and may be distributed by any standard method you are already familiar with. Instead of installing it interactively as we show in our demonstration, the unattended command line installation may accomplish the same thing silently.

Thin Desktop is by no means an advanced or highly evolved piece of software but I believe that is reflected in the price. As you indicated, your choices are either put all the pieces together manually and hope they work the way you intend or try a convenient, integrated, bundled package like Thin Desktop that can be supported.

I invite you to try out the fully functional thirty day trial to see how it works (www.thinlaunch.com/download.shtml). Your feedback is appreciated.

After watching your video demo on your sight, I did see simplicity of it, which I do really like.  I also thought about it more, and thought how it could easily be used to run something like a web browser which then connected back to an application server to run a system into a simple kiosk (given that you can pass a parameter into the exe like the URL).   i also see your point about the ease of deployment; so I redact my previous statement, and will say that it sounds like a great product.

Thanks for taking the time to watch the demo. I appreciate your comments. Our goal has always been to solve the problem in the most simple, elegant way possible. 

Thanks for the feedback and for taking the time to dig into it deeply on a technical level. The next update to Thin Desktop will address this. It is being tested now. The major improvements will be (1) the password for the auto logon user will be moved to the local security authority and not saved as plain text within the registry. (2) The password will be a random, strong password specific to each computer on which Thin Desktop is installed. (3) The special purpose ThinDesktopUser will be removed from the Administrators and left in the Users group after first run. It may be further restricted by the administrator if desired. 

Other than price, why would I not use WinSelect?