At Ease: Finder Access Issues & Extensions Manager

I have an issue controlling my At Ease users while running System 7.5.

When running System 7.5 and the user holds down the space bar at startup, the Extensions Manager control panel activates. This creates a issue because I use At Ease for some measure of system protection.

The issue is that opening the Extensions Manager window at startup allows the user to deselect At Ease Startup, which turns At Ease off. After deselecting At Ease and closing the Extensions Manager window, the computer will boot normally into At Ease until the computer is restarted. When it is restarted, it goes right to the Finder. With At Ease disabled the user has complete access to everything. I can't allow this.

How can I prevent my students from getting access to the Finder, yet still run System 7.5 and At Ease?
Workarounds:

Remove Extensions Manager From the Control Panels folder
Move the Extensions Manager control panel out of the Control Panels folder. This will prevent the spacebar from activating the Extensions Manager at startup.

Users with access to the Finder, such as yourself, can still open the Extensions Manager and use it without it actually residing in the Control Panel folder. Moving it out of the Control Panel folder will not disable it entirely, it will only disable the spacebar access to it at startup.

Remove Extensions Manager From the Extensions folder
You can also remove the EM Extension itself, which also prevents the spacebar from opening the control panel window at startup. If you do remove the EM Extension, it will no longer be functional. However, At Ease will not let users open this control panel even if they have access to other control panels.

Notes:

1) The EM extension will be at the top of your Extensions folder list if you are viewing by name. It has an extra space in front of its name so that it will load first, before the other extensions.

2) This issue is resolved in the At Ease 3.0.
Published Date: Feb 19, 2012