mikael@vall.dsv.su.se (Mikael Kindborg) (11/11/89)
------ There have been a few questions lately concerning the 'root' or 'background' window in Windows. In fact, there exists a kind of root window. In this text I will refer to this window as the background window. If you use Spy you will see that the background window has the style WS_POPUP and the class name "desktop". I have tried to get a handle to the background window by calling: FindWindow((LPSTR)"desktop", (LPSTR)NULL) but this did not work (i.e NULL is returned). I have also tried WindowFromPoint(), which works fine (this is likely to be the method Spy uses). The problem is that WindowFromPoint() is not very reliable. If a window is maximized for instace, you can't access the background window. Another approach is to use EnumWindows() and test on the class name for each window. I have not tried this method yet, so I don't know if it will work. I would be very grateful for any suggestions on how to access the background window in a reliable way. Mikael Kindborg Dep. of Computer Science Univ of Stockholm S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden