My colleague was annoyed that pressing Win-Enter on Windows 8 would pop open Windows Narrator, and there was seemingly no way to disable it. He told me that the answer he found on one of the forums suggested removing the execute permission from the Narrator.exe file, however, since this involves preventing file execution, this led me to an idea to try and use my old friend Image File Execution Options, which I’m happy to report, worked!
- Open regedit.exe and navigate to:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options - Create a folder (key) called Narrator.exe
- Inside the key, create a new String value called Debugger, and set its value to %1
- Close registry editor
From now on, every time Windows will attempt to execute Narrator.exe, nothing will happen!
If you need Narrator.exe back, just remove the Narrator.exe registry key.