How to hide desktop window?

[Jianmin]

I am using LabVIEW 7.1 and Widows 2000. I want to hide the desktop window. Does anyone know how to do it using LabVIEW program?

Thanks.

Jim

[Trager]

Well, this is pretty significantly ugly, but you could create a LabVIEW window that's larger than your desktop, set the position so that it covers the whole background, and make it not-closable and not-minimizable.  That would cover up the desktop and be pretty hard to get rid of.  Is that what you wanted?

[Jianmin]

Thanks for your reply. I know you can do it that way. I still want to have a function to hide the desktop window. I know how to get the window handler using FindWindwA in User32.dll to hide windows other than desktop window. I have trouble to get the window handler of Desktop window using GetDesktopWindow function in useer32.dll and hide it. In fact, I got the desktop window handler and it cannot be hide.

Jim

[Trager]

That doesn't surprise me that you can't use the winAPI to hide the desktop window.  Do you have Active Desktop enabled?  If so, disabling Active Desktop might let you hide the desktop window, but I would tend to doubt it.  There's a reason browser programmers developed 'kiosk' mode.

[rolfk]

I think you can't do that. The desktop window is the parent of all other windows and hiding it would probably get Windows in a mess with window management somehow, hiding any and all other windows too. There is however a different option mentioned somewhere around here. You can define the shell application that starts up when Windows opens. By default this is explorer.exe and in Windows 3.1 days was the File Manager. Somewhere you can replace this with any Windows executable and the system will then startup with that application as shell program. So you could create a LabVIEW application that opens a full screen window or whatever you like and install that one as your shell.

The settings for this are probably different for different systems.

In Windows 9x/ME you were supposedly to edit the system.ini file by replacing the line SHELL=explorer.exe with SHELL=<yourapp>.exe

In Windows NT/2000/XP this is a registry setting  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "Shell"="<yourapp>.exe"

It would be a good idea to have in your application somewhere a (password protected) option to startup the explorer or other Windows tools using System Exec.vi

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Jianmin]

Thanks for your replies. I know there are many shareware on the internet which can do it. I just wonder if we can use LabVIEW to do it. Maybe I just want to hide the icons on the desktop, because I don't want the user to click the icons on the desktop.

Thanks.

Jim

[Jianmin]

Thanks for your replies. I know there are many shareware on the internet which can do it. I just wonder if we can use LabVIEW to do it. Maybe I just want to hide the icons on the desktop, because I don't want the user to click the icons on the desktop.

Thanks.

Jim

[zou]

Desktop icons is on a grandchild window of desktop window.   Hide that window, all icons will disappear.

George Zou

http://gtoolbox.yeah.net

[jtc]

Dear Mr. Rolf Kalbermatter,

I read this thread which is related to what I am looking for. I will load my LabVIEW execution file to a Windows XP Embedded computer. I will put the file in the Start up menu so that everytime the computer turns ON, the front panel will show up. How can I prevent the user from changing the screen or opening/accessing the Windows panel?  I just want to show the LabVIEW Front panel always. I want to put a password protection option to start up the explorer.

"In Windows NT/2000/XP this is a registry setting  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "Shell"="<yourapp>.exe"
It would be a good idea to have in your application somewhere a (password protected) option to startup the explorer or other Windows tools using System Exec.vi"

Do you have a sample VI for this?

[rolfk]

---

@bong wrote:

Dear Mr. Rolf Kalbermatter,

I read this thread which is related to what I am looking for. I will load my LabVIEW execution file to a Windows XP Embedded computer. I will put the file in the Start up menu so that everytime the computer turns ON, the front panel will show up. How can I prevent the user from changing the screen or opening/accessing the Windows panel?  I just want to show the LabVIEW Front panel always. I want to put a password protection option to start up the explorer.

"In Windows NT/2000/XP this is a registry setting  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "Shell"=".exe"
It would be a good idea to have in your application somewhere a (password protected) option to startup the explorer or other Windows tools using System Exec.vi"

Do you have a sample VI for this?

---

Not around at the moment. But it is not something you would do in your LabVIEW application anyhow, really. Basically you do not put the executable into the Startup folder but instead edit the according registry key to use your executable as shell program. You do this by starting up regedit and go to the key and modify it. There is no real sense in integrating that into your LabVIEW program since once it is running in that mode you won't need to update the registry each time and otherwise you will have to provide a login to startup your application anyhow, so you can also start regedit to make this modification once. Beware that this type of deployment has a lot of implications such as that it gets difficult to get back into the system once your shell has been replaced by a custom program and that can be trickky while you debug and develop your application and believe me you will have to go back into your application many times and make changes to it before it works more or less as you have made it up in your mind.

But since Ctrl-Alt-Del will still be active you should be able to get into the Task manager and go from there (File->New Task). Also note that disabling Ctrl-Alt-Del is actually something Windows has been designed specifically to not allow, although there might be some very obscure ways to get that disabled too. I believe that you can set some registry setting to at least disable the Task Manager button in the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen. But this type of information is best researched on msdn.microsoft.com.

Rolf Kalbermatter