Can someone tell me if it's my system or a known limitation that I lose the ability to interact with the PIA app if I load it on start rather than on login ?
I'm using Windows 10. When I set PIA to load on startup in the taskscheduler it will autoconnect and run in the background but I get no taskbar icon and nothing happens when I run the program manually.
When you say you start it on "start", when exactly is this in the boot process and as which user does this run?
As far as I know, we use a scheduled task to launch the app because it's the only way to start it in your user session, with administrator privileges without triggering an UAC prompt. So depending on which startup position you have put it, since the app launches its GUI directly as a child of the main service, the GUI might have started in a session you can't see or just failed to start the GUI altogether and just connected the VPN. If it launches before your desktop is loaded/you have logged in, then it just had nowhere to go.
The app is really not meant to do that and I would highly recommend leaving it how it is by default. If you want to disable it at startup, it's better to use the built-in option as PIA might still need to start for a brief moment at boot to clean up your network configuration if it didn't get the chance to (for example, power loss or full system crash).
Our upcoming version awaiting QA testing, v76, should also make it start faster on Windows which should help with your desire to make it start earlier
Comments
When I set PIA to load on startup in the taskscheduler it will autoconnect and run in the background but I get no taskbar icon and nothing happens when I run the program manually.
As far as I know, we use a scheduled task to launch the app because it's the only way to start it in your user session, with administrator privileges without triggering an UAC prompt. So depending on which startup position you have put it, since the app launches its GUI directly as a child of the main service, the GUI might have started in a session you can't see or just failed to start the GUI altogether and just connected the VPN. If it launches before your desktop is loaded/you have logged in, then it just had nowhere to go.
The app is really not meant to do that and I would highly recommend leaving it how it is by default. If you want to disable it at startup, it's better to use the built-in option as PIA might still need to start for a brief moment at boot to clean up your network configuration if it didn't get the chance to (for example, power loss or full system crash).
Our upcoming version awaiting QA testing, v76, should also make it start faster on Windows which should help with your desire to make it start earlier