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POHow to find the IWebBrowser2 pointer for an IE8 window given a PID?
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copied!<p>so far, I've successfully used the following function to retrieve the IWebBrowser2 pointer to a running Internet Explorer instance, given it's PID.</p> <pre><code>static SHDocVw::IWebBrowser2Ptr findBrowserByPID( DWORD pid ) { SHDocVw::IShellWindowsPtr ptr; ptr.CreateInstance(__uuidof(SHDocVw::ShellWindows)); if ( ptr == NULL ) { return 0; } // number of shell windows const long nCount = ptr->GetCount(); // iterate over all shell windows for (long i = 0; i < nCount; ++i) { // get interface to item no i _variant_t va(i, VT_I4); IDispatchPtr spDisp = ptr->Item(va); SHDocVw::IWebBrowser2Ptr spBrowser(spDisp); if (spBrowser != NULL) { // if there's a document we know this is an IE object // rather than a Windows Explorer instance HWND browserWindow; try { browserWindow = (HWND)spBrowser->GetHWND(); } catch ( const _com_error &e ) { // in case ->GetHWND() fails continue; } DWORD browserPID; GetWindowThreadProcessId( browserWindow, &browserPID ); if ( browserPID == pid ) { return spBrowser; } } } return 0; } </code></pre> <p>What I do is to launch an <code>explorer.exe</code> process via <code>CreateProcess</code> and then use the above function to retrieve the IWebBrowser2Ptr to it (so that I can fiddle with the browser).</p> <p>Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with Internet Explorer 8 anymore, since IE8 seems to reuse processes - at least to some degree. For two code sequences like:</p> <pre><code>PROCESS_INFORMATION pi; // ... if ( CreateProcess( ..., &pi ) ) { // Wait a bit to give the browser a change to show its window // ... IWebBrowser2 *pWebBrowser = findBrowserByPID( pi.dwProcessId ); } </code></pre> <p>The first run of this code works fine, the second one never manages to retrieve the pWebBrowser window.</p> <p>After a bit of debugging, it was revealed that the <code>findBrowserByPID</code> function does find lots of browser windows (and it finds more after starting a second browser instance), but none of them belong to the newly started process. It seems that all windows belong to the first IE process which was started.</p> <p>Does anybody know an alternative way to get the IWebBrowser2 pointer to some IE8 instance? Or is there maybe a way to disable this apparent 'reuse' of processes with IE8?</p>

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