I need a message pump that doesn't mess up my open window

Question

My application (the bootstrap application for an installer that I\'m working on needs to launch some other applications (my installer and third party installers for my installer

Answer 1

I've also posted this question on the Microsoft forums, and thanks to the help of one Doug Harris at Microsoft, I found out my problem with my HWND and HMENU values was, indeed due to stale CWwnd* and CMenu* pointers (obtained using GetMenu() and GetDialogItem() calls. Getting the pointers again after launching the second app solved that problem. Also, he pointed me to a web site* that showed a better way of doing my loop using MsgWaitForMultipleObjects() to control it that doesn't involve the busy work of waiting a set amount of time and polling the process for an exit code.

My loop now looks like this:

if (bWait)
{
  // In order to allow updates of the GUI to happen while we're
  // waiting for the application to finish, we must run a message
  // pump here to allow messages to go through and get processed.
  LONG  nIdleCount = 0;
  for (;;)
  {
    MSG msg;
    if (::PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_NOREMOVE))
      PumpMessage();
    else //if (!OnIdle(nIdleCount++))
    {
      nIdleCount = 0;
      if (!PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_NOREMOVE))
      {
        DWORD nRes = ::MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(1, &ProcessInfo.hProcess,
                                                 FALSE, INFINITE, QS_ALLEVENTS);
        if (nRes == WAIT_OBJECT_0)
          break;
      }
    }
  }
}
::GetExitCodeProcess(ProcessInfo.hProcess, &dwExitCode);

*That Web site, if you're curious, is: http://members.cox.net/doug_web/threads.htm