Reentry

A Windows startup / session-restore monitor. Reentry starts first among user apps at logon and shows pending, starting, interactive, failed, and hung app initializations with elapsed time. Reentry-configured startup entries sort first and carry a Reentry-managed badge.

Built by Funcular Labs.

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Honesty

Windows has no public pending-restore list. After a reboot, Explorer, Outlook, Chrome, and friends reopen windows from private session files that we do not parse.

Reentry infers restore work from a last-session snapshot we take ourselves (ARR-registered processes we can see, visible windows, plus the current startup inventory) and matches that to live processes and windows. That is an inference, not an official Windows API.

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What it does

• Always-on-top HUD after /autostart or an unexpected shutdown.
• Banner for boot kind: expected (User32 1074), unexpected (6008 / Kernel-Power 41), or ordinary.
• Session restore (inferred) and Startup apps sections.
• Settings: list inventory, enable/disable user-scope items via StartupApproved (the Run value is not deleted), add/remove a Reentry-owned user Run entry.
• First-run consent: Start with Windows so we can show restore progress after a reboot.
• Single-instance. Registers itself with RegisterApplicationRestart.
• WM_QUERYENDSESSION / WM_ENDSESSION write last-session.json.
• /uninstall (or /cleanup) deletes the Run value, StartupApproved value, and logon task.

Reentry never kills a hung app.

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Build & run

Requires Windows and the .NET 10 SDK. You cannot compile the WinUI head on Linux; Reentry.Core (and its tests) target net10.0 and are fakeable.

dotnet run --project src/Reentry.App
dotnet test tests/Reentry.Core.Tests/Reentry.Core.Tests.csproj

Distributable single-file exe (needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime on the target):

pwsh ./publish.ps1                 # framework-dependent (small)
pwsh ./publish.ps1 -SelfContained  # bundles the .NET runtime (portable, larger)

→ publish/Reentry.exe

The app is unpackaged (WindowsPackageType=None) and uses the installed Windows App SDK 2.4 runtime (WindowsAppSDKSelfContained=false). The self-contained 2.4 CoreMessagingXP payload fail-fasts on Windows 11 25H2.

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Data & privacy

Everything is local. Settings, the last-session snapshot, and the managed-entry sidecar live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Reentry (settings.json, last-session.json, managed-entries.json). Delete that folder to reset. Set REENTRY_DATA_DIR to relocate it. Nothing is uploaded; nothing phones home.

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Architecture

• Reentry.Core — paths, settings, inventory, StartupApproved merge, snapshot store, boot classifier, tracker state machine, managed-entry map. No UI, no Win32. net10.0, unit-tested with fakes.
• Reentry.App — WinUI 3 unpackaged HUD, settings, tray, CsWin32 / Task Scheduler implementations of the Core interfaces.
• Reentry.Core.Tests — xUnit. Not in Reentry.slnx (Aperture pattern); CI runs dotnet test on the csproj directly.

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Status

v0 scaffold (0.1.0-alpha1) — dogfood the HUD and inventory on a real Windows box.

License

MIT © 2026 Funcular Labs.