Lotus notes running or not? using registry

Question

I have an application written based on lotus notes client. I wanted to check whether lotus notes is running before starting my application, so that I can skip asking for password from the user if "Don't prompt for password from other notes-based programs" is checked.

One method is get all the running process and look for nlnotes.exe and notes2.exe process to confirm.

Is there any other method to achieve the same.

To be more specific, I want to know whether any registry entries are made to say that notes is currently running. We can't open two instances of notes client, this made me think IBm might have used registry entry to check for running instance.

Kindly correct me if I'm wrong.

Answer 1

The registry would not be a good place for info like that, because if the client crashed the registry data would need to be cleaned up. The same is true for lock files. So while I can't say for sure, I believe IBM detects whether the client is already running by looking for in-memory objects - e.g., shared memory sections, mutexes, etc. Using Process Explorer, I see several shared memory sections associated with the Notes processes. One likely candidate is a section called -LTSCS-22275429-MEM9, but I don't know how that name is generated, if it ever changes with reinstall, reboot, etc. It would take a fair amount of experimentation to determine that - and then of course one would have to figure out how to write the code to detect it, but that's my best guess as to how it's done.