Starting a process but not displaying a window

Question

I am trying to open an external executable. I can easily open external executables using a class Processfrom System.Diagnostics:

Process p = new Process()
p.StartInfo.FileName = processName;
p.Start();

This works great with most programs, such as browsers and notepads, creating a process and demonstrating its graphical interface. However, when I try to open my desired program, the process starts (you can see it in the task manager, even the whole CPU core is required to process it), but the GUI window does not appear. What can happen to a process from Process.Startnot to show its graphical interface?

For reference, the program I want to run is ADOM release 60 , which works 100% perfectly when I open it directly in Explorer or in Powershell. This is reproduced both in console applications and in WindowsForms.

Here are some other settings that did not help:

p.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true; // or false
p.StartInfo.ErrorDialog = false;
p.StartInfo.WindowStyle = /* any of possible values */;
p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = true; // or false

Answer 1

You need to install WorkingDirectoryin the root folder where the executable is located.

var executablePath = .....;
var p = new Process();
p.StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(executablePath);
p.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = Path.GetDirectoryName(executablePath);
p.Start();

The default WorkingDirectoryvalue is %SYSTEMROOT%\System32. Many legacy applications have hardcoded relative paths that allow full paths with the specified directory, and will fail when trying to read (or create) files where they should not.