for a little project I have been working on I wanted to know if it was possible to trigger the shutting down screen animation in windows without actually shutting down the computer via script or something
Well you could experiment with SysWoW64\Shutdown.exe and Shutdownext.dll, maybe see if you can find something within those files, maybe with a hex editor, I should imagine the backdrop is just a standard Windows image taken from a specific folder. The animation might be hidden in a .mun file, probably in a resource folder.
If you can run some form of tracing app while shutting down and then use the app's log to see which process starts the image display and animation, you could go from there.
This is all just guess work though on my part.
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