wine users - May 2008 - HH.EXE location

This is related to my post about .chm where vitamin set me on the right path.
http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=1026

Since then I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 and wine.
While perusing the virgin registry I noticed the chm.file ...command key was:
C:\windows\system32\hh.exe %1
There is no hh.exe located in that directory. The hh.exe file is located in the
C:\windows\ directory.
If wine uses the registry how does it find hh.exe?

I have a windows program whose help file is in chm format. It appears this
program calls hh.exe directly rather than use a ShellExecute to display it's
help file. I thought possibly I could replace hh.exe to see if I could get the
chm file to render properly. How would one go about this if wine is not using
hh.exe to display .chm files?

James

jcfuller wrote:
> While perusing the virgin registry I noticed the chm.file ...command key
was: C:\windows\system32\hh.exe %1
> There is no hh.exe located in that directory. The hh.exe file is located in
the C:\windows\directory.
> If wine uses the registry how does it find hh.exe?
> 

Wine is being tricky here.  For binaries that come with Wine it seems to be
happy if they are somewhere on the path and the path name specified when calling
the built-in is also on the path.  If I were to take a *guess* I'd say that
this likely has to do something with maintaining compatibility across several
different versions of Windows.

If you change HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\chm.file\shell\open\command to c:\test.bat and
create a test.bat file there, Wine will run it instead of hh.exe when the
appropriate ShellExecute api is called.

For example if we create c:\test.bat with a single pause command, change the
registry accordingly, and then do a "wine start calc.chm" (assumming
calc.chm exists in the current directory), the test.bat file will be executed.


jcfuller wrote:
> 
> I have a windows program whose help file is in chm format. It appears this
program calls hh.exe directly rather than use a ShellExecute to display it's
help file. I thought possibly I could replace hh.exe to see if I could get the
chm file to render properly. How would one go about this if wine is not using
hh.exe to display .chm files?
> 
> James

Only works for programs that actually call hh.exe directly or via ShellExecute
(aka what start.exe uses).  If they use MS Help APIs, you're probably out of
luck for the time being.  Its still very much a work in progress as with many
things related to Wine's IE/com/ole/activex replacement.

Thanks for the info Jim.
Do the commercial products (Crossover....) support html help?

James