I am new to this forum and would appreciate some help if at all possible. Sorry the message is a little long but I just wanted to give as much detail as needed.
I suspect that what I am trying to do may be impossible, but even if that is the case I would be gratefull if someone could let me know, so that I dont spend all night pulling my hair out trying to do the impossible
Here is the scenario
I have created a home theatre PC, using XBMC 12.3 (Frodo) as the main media centre software and with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit as the operating software.
I have attached a Microsoft Wirelees gaming receiver to the PC so that I can use my Xbox 360 Wireless Gamepad to control the PC and have used the program 'Xpadder' to configure several different button layouts set up accordingly so that I can use the Gamepad to control the various different applications, games and emulators etc. that I use.
Finally, I have used EventGhost (Ver 0.4.1.r1640) along with the Task Create/Switch Events plugin (Ver1.0.3) to monitor the system and automate several things.
I have combined these elements to achieve the following:
--->XBMC and EventGhost start with Windows
--->EventGhost monitors what is the current active application
--> When the current active application changes EventGhost sends a command to Xpadder to switch the Controller configuration accordingly
For example, When the computer starts it boots into XBMC, EventGhost see's this and sends a command to Xpadder that configures the controller to use the XBMC button layout. If I then start using the emulator MAME, then EventGhost see's this and sends a command to Xpadder, switching the control layout to that which I made for MAME.
This all works fine.
However I wanted to make my media centre run more efficiently, and also to make it act more like a set-top box that boots straight into XBMC without the need to load Windows Explorer as the shell, as most of the facilities of Windows are not used in my media centre.
To achieve this I did the following:
--->I modified my Windows registry so that it use EventGhost as the shell instead of Windows Explorer
---> I added an Autostart Action in EventGhost that loads the XBMC application along with EventGhost.
This seems to work. When the system is started Widows Explorer does not start and EventGhost is launched in the background, which in turn loads XBMC. The system runs fine, but does have one major issue.
Without Windows Explorer running EventGhost does not seem to be able to monitor the system and recognise when I switch between applications, which in turn means that my controller layouts don't change.
It appears to me that EventGhost and the Task Create/Switch Events plugin are dependant on Windows Explorer to be running in order to work.
Is this the case, and if so is there any way that I can get around this, maybe by using a different plugin, that will enable me to monitor the system and send commands accordingly without Explorer running in the background.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Matthew Hope