Windows 2000 build 1796

Windows 2000 build 1796.1 is a build of Windows 2000, shared on 25 January 2009. It is the last build of Windows 2000 to include the Show Desktop button at the right side of the taskbar. This would not be seen again until Windows 7 build 6568.

Boot-time graphics
This build introduces the VGA Boot Driver, which allows simple graphics mode operations (bit blit, solid color fill, and displaying text) at boot time as compared to earlier versions, which only supported text mode. The boot screen, safe to shutdown and hibernation screens have been updated to take advantage of it and are now graphical by default, with the resources being stored in the kernel executable.

The blue screen of death is black in this build due to a bug presumably related to this change. Furthermore, the gradient bar in the boot screen graphic does not rotate in this build due to that functionality assumably not being implemented as of this build.

It is possible to revert to the old text mode code paths by adding  to the kernel command line in.

Shell

 * The default desktop background color from the teal used in previous builds has been changed to the shade of blue that is used in later builds, while the boot, hibernation, and safe to shutdown screens still use teal as their background color. It would be changed to blue in the next build.
 * Network Neighborhood is renamed to My Network Places.
 * This build still contains the Show Desktop button seen in the previous build, but the menu on the right of the button was removed.

Installation

 * Installing this build in hypervisors will result in a BSOD on startup due to incompatibility with the floppy disk controller file, . Either delete or rename it, which will disable access to floppy disk drives, or replace it with a later build's   after text-mode setup by using a DOS/Windows 9x boot disk.
 * Booting from the CD results in a BSOD, use a DOS/Windows 9x boot disk to run  (not  ) from CD.

Control Panel

 * Multimedia Control Panel applet may crash when clicking on CD Music.
 * Like most later builds of Windows Longhorn, many system sounds don't work as they are pointed to the  directory instead of the   directory. Even if the registry entry is modified to point to the Media directory, the sounds often don't work for unknown reasons.

Drivers

 * Sound cards may not operate properly in this build; and can be difficult to fix the problem. However, some users don't have this issue. This also appears in the next leaked build.

Virtual PC
This build's ACPI implementation is extremely buggy in Virtual PC and is prone to frequent crashes. This can be avoided by pressing the F5 key at the F6 disk prompt and picking the Standard PC HAL driver on the first stage, which will disable ACPI.

Hibernation
The progress bar shown when the system is hibernating doesn't fill up the entire bar. Instead, a text-mode message will appear in the top left corner saying. This also appears in the next leaked build.