Failing to Revive AUTOEXEC.BAT on Windows 7 & 10

The author investigates whether modern Windows still parses AUTOEXEC.BAT by re-creating the legacy ParseAutoexec registry value and monitoring boot activity with ProcMon; the experiments produced no evidence that AUTOEXEC.BAT is accessed or parsed, suggesting the feature is effectively dead. The post emphasizes that legacy auto-start behaviors were migrated into registry keys (e.g., Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows and Winlogon) and that those registry-based persistence mechanisms continue to be abused by threat actors.