The language bar, as handy as Microsoft think it is can cause real hassle in terminal services or Citrix sessions. Seeing a language bar for each opened application is both annoying and confusing… and well lets face it, how do often you actually use it?

As the language bar is part on the office installation, i did not want to go fiddling with the installation properties incase it knocked anything else in the office install out of sync but i did need to remove it from 70+ citrix servers without much overhead.

I read an article recently on the citrix forums and it suggested that ctfmon.exe was the owner of the language bar, once i knew this i wrote a script to deny users access to this file, which in turn would block from running.

I decided to use xcacls as a command line utility, i used xcacls to straight out deny members of the users group (locally) to access the file, this is done like this:

xcacls.exe C:windowssystem32ctfmon.exe /E /d users /Y

if you are using windows 2000, you can copy the xcacls.exe to an network share and run it from there without any issue.

serversharexcacls.exe %SystemRoot%system32ctfmon.exe /E /d users /Y

and if you want to hit 60+ servers remotely, use psexec

psexec @servers.txt -u domainusername cmd /c “servernamectxutilsxcacls.exe %SystemRoot%system32ctfmon.exe /E /d users /Y”

Servers.txt would be in the same directory as psexec, and would contain the server names one per line.

I’ve uploaded the script here:

Update:

As of server 2008 / windows vista the above fix no longer works, this is due to the language bar being heavily integrated.

The following key controls the language bar in these operating systems:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftCTFLangBar

Showstatus (DWORD).

To hide the language bar, set the value of showstatus to 3.

This can be done using a mandatory profile or group policy as below: