NVDA 2026.1 Beta 1 & 2 appear to be turning on the "Use NVDA during sign-in" setting sans any user action to do so.

[britechguy]

Brief summary

See NVDA Screen Reader Group Topic: Setting, Use NVDA during sign-in, has it become the default in NVDA 2026.1 Beta 2?

Several people are now reporting that after installing the 2026.1 beta 1 or beta 2, that this setting is turned on, and that they did not do this by hand.

Steps to reproduce

Install either NVDA 2026.1 beta 1 or beta 2.

One incident was with a fresh beta 1 installation, the other when beta 1 to beta 2 update, using NVDA's built-in update process, was completed.

Actual behavior

Described above in issue title.

Expected behavior

No change in the checkbox for the noted setting if it was not previously activated.

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments

N/A.

NVDA type

installed copy

NVDA version

NVDA 2026.1 Beta 1 and Beta 2

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

No response

Windows version

Win11 25H2 Build 26200.7840

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue

N/A

Other information about your system

No response

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

I have restarted my computer and the issue still occurs

If NVDA add-ons are disabled, is your problem still occurring?

I have not restarted NVDA with add-ons disabled

Does the issue still occur after you run the COM Registration Fixing Tool in NVDA's tools menu?

I have not run the COM Registration Fixing Tool

[YetiAnt]

I changed from 25.3.2 installation to 26.1b1 by raning the installer and selecting "install".
I never used Use NVDA on logonscreen on this macine.
But after having installed 26.1b1 the box was checked.
I also use W11 25h2
There is another strange behavior of the installer:
Until now, the existing desktop shortcut was always retained. This time the old one was deleted and a new one was created. This meant that NVDA suddenly had a new keyboard shortcut for me. I don't use the standard CTRL+Alt+N.

[josephsl]

Hi,

As for the desktop shortcut issue (a completely different issue), this is because NVDA 2026.1 is now installed onto C:\Program Files as opposed to C:\Program Files (x86) in prior releases.

As for the issue at hand, technical: "start on secure screens" and "start after sign in" settings values are taken from Windows Registry. When these values are set, a registry key is written, which is then evaluated by Ease of Access when configuring which assistive technologies to start as soon as Windows is ready to run third-party desktop applications. So, I suspect something with Windows Registry handling may have gone a bit off when migrating from NVDA 2025.3.2 to 2026.1 beta. Note that this does not affect portable NVDA.

Thanks.