The other day I intended to close a Remote Desktop window and instead hit the Close button (the X on the right of the window’s caption bar) on the console window running our data broker. Nothing like an abnormal exit to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

So I went looking for a way to prevent that particular problem from occurring again. Disabling the Close button is pretty easy. In fact, there are at least two ways to do it. Neither is ideal.

The Close button is on the window’s system menu. You can get a handle to the system menu by calling the GetSystemMenu Windows API function. In addition to the buttons on the window’s caption bar, this menu also contains the menu items you see if you click on the box at the left of the window:

Given a handle to the system menu, you have (at least) two choices:

1. Call EnableMenuItem to disable the caption bar’s Close button.
2. Call DeleteMenu to remove the Close item from the menu. Doing so will also disable the Close button on the caption bar.

The second option looks like the best, because it prevents me from hitting the Close button, and also prevents me from inadvertently clicking the Close menu item when I’m going for Edit. The C# code for the second option looks like this:

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern IntPtr GetConsoleWindow();

[DllImport("user32")]
private static extern IntPtr GetSystemMenu(IntPtr hWnd, bool bRevert);

[DllImport("user32")]
private static extern bool DeleteMenu(IntPtr hMenu, uint uPosition, uint uFlags);

private const int MF_BYPOSITION = 0x0400;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    // Get the console window handle
    IntPtr winHandle = GetConsoleWindow();

    // Get the system menu
    IntPtr hmenu = GetSystemMenu(winHandle, false);

    // Delete the Close item from the menu
    DeleteMenu(hmenu, 6, MF_BYPOSITION);

    // rest of program follows
}

That works well, as you can see from this screen shot:

But there’s a problem. To restore the menu when your program is done, you’re supposed to call GetSystemMenu and pass true for the second parameter, telling it to restore the menu, like this:

GetSystemMenu(winHandle, true);

The result is probably not what you expect:

The system didn’t revert to the previous menu, but rather to the default system menu–the one created for every window. The Edit, Defaults, and Properties items that cmd.exe adds to the menu are gone.

Since I can’t reliably restore the menu after deleting an item, I figured I’d call EnableMenuItem to disable the Close item. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be possible. At least, I haven’t been able to make it work. Since I often need the Edit menu item even after the program exits, I’m going with the first option and hoping that I don’t hit the Close menu item by mistake when going for the Edit menu while the program is running.

An aside: we have the term “fat finger” to describe hitting the wrong key on the keyboard. Is there a similar expression for making a mistake with the mouse? I suppose “mis-mouse” would do, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “fat finger.”