Such behaviour is not supported....
Although, there are some "tricks" you can do:
----METHOD 1----
only recommended to read this, do not use this method!
First you need to know that Plus! knows 3 different hooking methods:
1) Default hooking
2) Forced hooking
3) Alternative hooking
The first two are, in this context, roughly the same. When one of these hooking methods is choosen, the executable MsgPlus.exe must be running in the background. This executable is just the loader of Messenger Plus! which checks if the starting program is Messenger or not, it is not Messenger Plus! itself. If the starting program isn't Messenger, the executable (the Plus! loader) does absolutely nothing. If the starting program is Messenger, the executable (the Plus! loader) will start Messenger Plus! (MsgPlusH.DLL) and will hook it to the program.
This also means that msgplus.exe (the loader) doesn't need to be running once Messenger Plus! is hooked.
and thus this also gives you a hint of one way you can do what you want.
The third method uses a different approach. Instead of an always needing to run Plus! loader, thus the executable msgplus.exe, a special registry setting is applied to Windows. With this special registry setting the loader does
not need to be running all the time. It will only be loaded and executed when a program starts up. This loading of the Plus! loader is automatically done by Windows itself. The rest works the same: once the Plus! loader is loaded it checks if the current program which has started is Messenger; if it is it loads and hooks Messenger Plus! itself (MsgPlusH.DLL), if not it quits again.
------------
So.... This means that you can't use the third method as the hooking option in Plus! (although IMO this is the preferred way of hooking in many situations) as you can't control when the loader of Plus! is loaded.
Only when you select the "default hooking" method you
could control when the Plus! loader is loaded in this way:
- Load the Plus! loader (aka, run msgplus.exe)
- Load MSN Messenger
- Wait a couple of seconds until Messenger Plus! itself is loaded and hooked into MSN Messenger
- Kill the Plus! loader process (aka, kill msgplus.exe) !!!
- Load Windows Messenger
(as there isn't a Plus! loader loaded/running anymore, Messenger Plus! will not be loaded and hooked into Windows Messenger)
Note that this method, though working, is not supported at all as it can cause problems for Messenger Plus!....
----METHOD 2----
use this documented method instead
Another method, and
documented in the official help pages and thus much much safer to do is to use some advanced Messenger Plus! registry keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Patchou\MsgPlus2\AttachToMsnMsg
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Patchou\MsgPlus2\AttachToWinMsg
They should contain a
DWORD value of either
1 (true) or
0 (false). When they don't exist, the default value of 1 (true) is assumed.
They keys themselfs already explain what they do:
- When AttachToMsnMsg doesn't exist or has the value 1, Plus! will hook into MSN Messenger. If AttachToMsnMsg has the value 0, it will not hook into MSN Messenger.
- When AttachToWinMsg doesn't exist or has the value 1, Plus! will hook into Windows Messenger. If AttachToWinMsg has the value 0, it will not hook into Windows Messenger.
In other words, in your case, just create a new DWORD registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Patchou\MsgPlus2\AttachToWinMsg
and set its value to
0.
This is the recommended method, also because it doesn't have problems with other possible registry keys like the RUN registry key which is always created when Plus! is loaded and hooked.
(More and that here: "
CookieRevised's reply to Startupmonitor issue").
--------------------
blah, /me kills Matty for being faster... I'm not going to delete this whole post now, after all the trouble of writing this...
though I'll give Matty the "pluim" (yeah, its dutch) for it...
/ 
