I''m currenly playing around with windows coding, and trying to familiarize myself with the terrain. I''ve written a tiny little app that uses GetTopWindow to grab a handle to the top window, and then (via a while loop and GetNextWindow) to spit the caption of each succesive window (by sending a WM_GETTEXT message) to a file. The program works just like it should, but the results confused me a bit. I had expected the resulting output to be the captions of all visible windows on the taskbar, but such is not the case. Here''s a sample peice of output (with blank window captions filtered out) Handle: 468 Caption: ZoneAlarm Handle: 340 Caption: Task Scheduler is ready. Handle: 464 Caption: ZoneAlarm Handle: 2904 Caption: TEST02 Handle: 2932 Caption: HbBubble Handle: 1460 Caption: Test02 Handle: 2912 Caption: OLEChannelWnd Handle: 1156 Caption: HbBubble Handle: 3148 Caption: AIMLogger Handle: 984 Caption: OLEChannelWnd Handle: 3096 Caption: OLEChannelWnd Handle: 3656 Caption: MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0 Handle: 2480 Caption: lutrosis34''s Buddy List Window Handle: 2656 Caption: Sign On Handle: 2680 Caption: Xprt Message Window Handle: 2236 Caption: Xprt Message Window Handle: 1376 Caption: AOL PPP VxD interface Handle: 1984 Caption: DDE Server Window Handle: 1972 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 1576 Caption: OLEChannelWnd Handle: 3516 Caption: DDE Server Window Handle: 3512 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 232 Caption: SYSTEM AGENT COM WINDOW Handle: 2828 Caption: DDHelpWndClass Handle: 2996 Caption: Spooler Process Handle: 976 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 944 Caption: Norton AntiVirus Handle: 448 Caption: Magellan MSWHEEL Handle: 444 Caption: Pointer.exe Invisible Window Handle: 424 Caption: Power Meter Handle: 316 Caption: DDE Server Window Handle: 312 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 244 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 228 Caption: DDE Server Window Handle: 224 Caption: OleMainThreadWndName Handle: 152 Caption: Winmodem NVRAM Handle: 456 Caption: MS_WebcheckMonitor Handle: 3752 Caption: Source File Properties Handle: 1968 Caption: America Online Handle: 1768 Caption: Lutrosis - Instant Message Handle: 3088 Caption: HbBubble Handle: 1580 Caption: Matt Handle: 384 Caption: Program Manager I included code to filter blank captions, but before doing so I noticed there were quite a few of them. So basically, what I''m wondering is what exactly are these? All running processes? Or mabye all running threads? I hate not knowing exactly what I''m seeing, so any help would be appreciated -Lutrosis

A little help here, guys (and gals)? I''m sure this isn''t that tough a question.

And no, I won''t be bringing this to the top again, I''ll bet you hate that as much as I do But perhaps someone who would normally respond just missed the post the first time around?. Hopefully not wishful thinking...

-Lutrosis

A lot of programs create hidden windows and use them solely for message processing (one window name implies this, "Pointer.exe Invisible Window").

Also, each icon on the task bar must have a window associated with it. If you don''t want this window to be shown on the taskbar, you''d make it hidden.