Also posted in microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc ...

I'm a programmer with not much experience with Tablet pcs .. and have been
asked to try to resolve an issue. I apologise for being lengthy .. trying
to be thorough.

Basically the problem is that the only way I can get the TIP to appear is by
clicking the icon on the taskbar. When I do so, handwriting input,
recognition and insertion of text into an edit box (or Notepad) all work
perfectly, just as expected. The problem is that for this application I
need to make the task bar inaccessible to the user. No other method of
producing the TIP works. Giving the focus to a control (Notepad's edit box)
has no effect. Gesturing does not work. Tapping the editbox near the
insertion point has no effect. The floating TIP icon NEVER appears. Only
clicking the icon on the task bar will cause the TIP to appear.

The computer is an Everun UMPC. I don't know a lot about it. It's
apparently a touch-screen rather than a real digitizer. It does not respond
to gestures at all .. not when hovering the stylus nor when touching the
screen with it.

Device Manager reports, under Mice and Other Pointing Devices, 2 instances
of 'HID-Compliant Mouse'. Under Keyboards it reports 2 HID Keyboard Devices.

MyComputer|Properties reports Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005
Version 2002 Service Pack 2. The computer was delivered with XP Home
installed, and a complete install of XP Tablet was done by a coworker before
I received it.

TabTip.exe and TCServer.exe are both running. Tipband.dll HAS been
registered.

In Control Panel|Regional and Language Options|Languages|Details|Settings
tab .. Tablet PC Correction, Tablet PC Correction for Windows Journal, and
Tablet PC Text Insertion are all listed under Advanced Text Services and the
language is English (United States) US in both the combo box and the list.
The keyboard is US. Under the Advanced tab, 'Extend support of advanced
text services to all programs' IS checked, and 'Turn off advanced text
services' is NOT checked.

Since the OS doesn't seem to want to behave as it should, I tried creating a
PenInputPanel obect via CoCreateInstance .. and apparently created it
successfully, yet couldn't get it to do anything. I later read that this
object was deprecated in SP2 and no longer functions. I was hoping to get
enough control to make the TIP appear under software control. I understand
that the current object is the TextInputPanel, but have found no info on how
to control it other than via .net, which is not an option for this old SDK
programmer still using C++.

I found the window class name for the input panel, and was able to make it
appear programmatically by using FindWindow and ShowWindow ... however, the
behavior of the window got a little strange .. when I minimized it, it would
leave behind a 'ghost' window on the screen (an always-on-top ghost at
that). When using FindWindow and ShowWindow to make the floating icon
appear, the input panel which would appear worked, but was
undocked,unmovable and could not be closed. Altogether a kludgy and
unworkable solution.

All I want to do is find out why the floating TIP icon doesn't appear
automatically. Can anyone point me in a new direction? I've had two days
of going in circles, and there's precious little information available on
this ..

Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated.