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I have a window which is supposed to act like a Windows Vista(+) gadget; its supposed to stay on the desktop, not to appear on taskbar and the alt+tab menu, but most importantly, not to get minimized.

Here is its header:

As its style is set to None, it has no control buttons (minimize, close, etc...) but it still can be minimized using the "Show Desktop" feature and the Winkey+D combination.

How can I prevent that from happening?

Thanks!

Tsury
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    When I hit Winkey+D ALL my windows minimize including any gadget windows. I think that this is the exact intention of the keyboard shortcut, and trying to circumvent it will most likely not please your users. – Martin Liversage Sep 07 '09 at 09:53
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    Well, I just added some gadgets (Windows 7) and Winkey+D did not minimize them, as I would expect from gadgets. Moreover, gadgets do not appear on Alt+Tab menu and on the Taskbar, which means that minimizing them == losing them. – Tsury Sep 07 '09 at 23:18

1 Answers1

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"Show Desktop" does more than just minimize windows - after minimizing all the windows it can, it then brings the desktop window to the top of the z-order. Raymond Chen has a good explanation of this.

You could mark your window as "always on top" but then it would appear on top of every window. I can't think of any other way of preventing Show Desktop from hiding your window. A quick experiment with Windows Sidebar shows that it is also minimized on Show Desktop unless you set the "Sidebar is always on top of other windows".

Phil Devaney
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