Bit of a strange request and I don't think it is possible to do what I want but just thought I would check and see if anyone had any suggestions.

I would like to have my application basically appear as if it was part of the desktop background, I've removed the form border etc and made the background colour of the form the same as our standard company background so it all blends in nicely. I have also made it so the app does not appear in the toolbar and it is set to launch on startup so it appears as soon as the user logs in - so all works fine and looks fine because any new apps that the user opens will open on top of my app. The only problem is that if they press the Show Desktop button (or use Windows Key + D) to minimize all apps, mine gets minimized as well and disappears. Its easy enough to get the user to make it appear again as it has a system tray icon that they can interact with, but it would be better if it just didn't vanish when they did this.

Now I know the best thing for this on Windows 7 would be a Gadget but the problem is that Gadget's annoyingly have to be HTML/javascript and a) I'm not great with web coding and b) I don't think it is even possible to do what my app does from a HTML/javascript page... oh and c) I can't find any way to deploy gadgets in a business network (there is no way we are installing it manually on all 300 of our PCs), so the gadget idea is not looking very promising.

Any thoughts? I'm wondering if there is some window message I can capture and ignore in the WndProc event handler but so far google hasn't helped much...

Cheers
Chris