Request: guidance on vb nag screen

[Wirestealth]

Heya mates.

Just starting out (Lena151 tutorial 30/40) and thought I would try my handy work at a freeware target (VB6) that had a nag screen.

Tuts 9 & 10 talk about VB, but I can't seem to extend what I've read to this situation.

The issue I am running into is that the target actually loads the About form (frmAbout) which in turn loads the main form (frmMain) after you click OK on the About form. You then are in the app and can open the About form again through the standard Help|About menu.

I want to remove the initial nag screen as a quick learning exercise and still have the App able to show the About screen through the Help|About.

I have used NuMega SmartCheck 6.2 to determine that it was actually frmAbout that loaded frmMain after OK was clicked. I have used VB Decompiler to see the VA's of the Forms, and was hoping it would be as easy as pushing the address of frmMain rather than frmAbout early in the code (not concerning myself yet with any initialization/etc that frmAbout would have done that I would be skipping and was gonna worry about that later lol).

Truthfully I am a little lost in all the VB crap and was wondering if there were any good tutorials (Lena's are great thus far but I'm looking for something more in depth with VB just to beat this app) or if my approach is just plain wrong.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Best Regards,
ws

[dion]

how about using a debugger, IDA or Olly?? i know its overkill, but if have no luck with one tool, you can use another one.

[DARKER]

the target actually loads the About form (frmAbout) which in turn loads the main form (frmMain) after you click OK on the About form. You then are in the app and can open the About form again through the standard Help|About menu.

You can try at the end of frmAbout Form_Load event jump to cmdOK Click event code. Result is that at the beginning NAG just blink and program run normally. frmAbout stay loaded in memory (Form_Load is not firing) so if you call it from About menu it should works.

[Wirestealth]

Heya mates, thanks a bunch.

@DARKER: Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have been using Olly as well with no love (still new to it though so I'm sure I just need to learn how best to use it for VB-based apps). I have used Olly for regular C++ apps with success (those in the Lena151 tutorials anyway :P).

@dion: I'm a little anal mate, and the only reason I am going through this using a freeware target is for the learning. Thus, my anal retentiveness doesn't even want the momentary 'blink' that I understand would happen.

I may look into setting the form visibility property to false and then calling the _Click event at the end of the load routine. I would inline this functionality after the load was called (as I don't believe the window has actually been shown yet). In your opinion, do you see any 'gotchas' with either inlining a call to MSVB6VM.dll to set a forms visibility to false or dig deeper into to the actual CreateWindow call parameters and remove the window style WS_VISIBLE (or make a call to ShowWindow to hide it)? Assuming this approach is viable I would then add the _Click event call to the end of the load routine.

Thanks for your replies

[Wirestealth]

Sorry as my last post had @DION and @DARKER mixed up.

@DARKER: Well I totally overthought this. I thought I would try your suggestion and see how bad the flicker was from frmAbout...well, and I should have thought of this from regular VB programming) since I jump to the OK button click event before I return from the load of frmAbout the form has yet to be made visible on screen and so the message queue gets the frmAbout.Hide added to it and apparently is processed before it is even made visible so that is all that was needed!

Thanks for the suggestion as I was totally making it more difficult than need be. I should have learned from the Tuts that you try the easiest approach first and work from there :P.

[The Old Pirate]

I think it's possible to make it to load frmMain instead of frmAbout. Could you please send me a PM with app name? I'd want to take a look at it.