Hello! This may be the wrong place to ask, but I take my chance.

I run Explorer as a filemanager on top of Litestep, and I like skinning, beside the windows borders I like to also skin the Explorer gadgets. Now, I use a visual style with a Y'z Toolbar theme, problem is that as soon as the last window of the Explorer process closes Explorer quits, which obviously takes the Y'z Toolbar (memory) patch with it, which leaves Y'z Toolbar clueless, Y'z Toolbar seems to modify the structures belonging to the Explorer process once only when it is launched, raising the problem described above.

Another utility is offcourse Styler Toolbar which adds its own gadgets (toolbar, addressbar etc), but it really kills the window rendering performance, assumingly because it renders into the Explorer gadget structures continuously at every window refresh (move, resize, etc).

Basically what would really help would be if Y'z acted as a daemon listening for new explorer processes, something it obviously does not do. Maybe there are daemon utilities that (re)launch apps according to creation of new processes (gonna google this one as I just thought about it) ?

So, anyone here with experience and a possible solution ? I'd appreciate that, thanks in advance.

Oh, if the topic does not belong here just delete it, np :)

Contact Y'z developers and ask them to support this. We can do nothing to help Y'z interact with Explorer.

Hi, thanks for the reply :)

Yes I know Litestep cannot do anything about it (I'm assuming "we" ment Litestep), therefore I asked if someone already had a solution, seems not however :(

yea..that was "we" as in the LSDev team.

Well, some generic daemon module *could* help ;)

Anyway, I came up with a (very sucky) solution for those interested (I don't use it myself 'cause it's so sucky xD):

1. dl CHP: http://www.commandline.co.uk/chp/ (for running progs with windows hidden)
2. create a new bat file with below content:

tskill YzToolBar
start /b cmd.exe /c "X:\PATH\TO\YZTOOLBAR_FOLDER\YzToolBar.exe"
explorer.exe "::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}"


3. create a new shortcut somewhere with below target:

X:\PATH\TO\CHP_FOLDER\chp.exe cmd.exe /c X:\PATH\TO\SCRIPT_FOLDER\NAME.bat

4. use this shortcut anywhere in your Litestep/other shell you like, you may offcourse replace "::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}" with "X:\SOME\PATH" when needed.

So, whats sucky ? well it eats a few megabytes for a few extra processes, but the most annoying is that YzToolBar will not succede initializing fast enough for you not to see explorer FM launch with original toolbar only to have it changed a second or so later :(
I know one could throw in some wait command in cmd between launching of yztoolbar and explorer, but then explorer will delay, which is sucky in a different way.. :(

BTW, the tskill command is for XP, i think NT/2000 should have kill or pskill (instead ?).

Oh, I forgot, one can use the CHD utility to open explorer with it's first window hidden, and since that window will stay hidden all the time explorer will never quit - until specifically killed from commandline or taskmgr - which will result in the toolbar skin remain offcourse.
But as u can guess (explorer owning around 10 megs mem - usually), this is sucky in a thrird way :)