tray icon

I have a client that has an application he would like to run on certain machines without users knowing it is running. It is a mixed shop of 95/98/NT 4/2000 clients. I have attempted to get the program to run as a service which worked with mixed success on 98 machines and completely failed on all others. I was wondering if there was a way to get a program to run without showing the tray icon?

You don't specify which language you're using, but if it's VB you can easily make a program "invisible" by setting the main form's "ShowInTaskbar" property to false.

Obviously if you're using a different language then you may be able to achieve the same effect.

http://www.vbworld.com/misc/tip135.html


Hiding Your Program in the Ctrl-Alt-Del list

To do this, your must register your program as a service. This is done by passing the process ID of your application to the RegisterService API.

Declarations

Copy the following code into the declarations section of a module:

Public Declare Function GetCurrentProcessId _
Lib "kernel32" () As Long
Public Declare Function GetCurrentProcess _
Lib "kernel32" () As Long
Public Declare Function RegisterServiceProcess _
Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwProcessID As Long, _
ByVal dwType As Long) As Long

Public Const RSP_SIMPLE_SERVICE = 1
Public Const RSP_UNREGISTER_SERVICE = 0
Procedures

To remove your program from the Ctrl+Alt+Delete list, call the MakeMeService procedure:

Public Sub MakeMeService()
Dim pid As Long
Dim reserv As Long

pid = GetCurrentProcessId()
regserv = RegisterServiceProcess(pid, RSP_SIMPLE_SERVICE)
End Sub
To restore your application to the Ctrl+Alt+Delete list, call the UnMakeMeService procedure:

Public UnMakeMeService()
Dim pid As Long
Dim reserv As Long

pid = GetCurrentProcessId()
regserv = RegisterServiceProcess(pid, _
RSP_UNREGISTER_SERVICE)
'End Code
Don't forget to unregister your application as a service before it closes to free up system resources by calling UnMakeMeService