Open Windows Start Menu with a batch file?

Question

Is it possible to create a batch file that will open the Windows Start Menu?

I have been digging around in the Windows Registry, have searching the Internet, and just tried making things up as I go. However I haven't found anything that would open the Start Menu. All I have found is posts about removing the Windows 8 Start Menu.

the reason i need this is i am running parallels 7 on an imac in coherance mode and in order to open the start menu you right-click on the parallels icon by the clock in the top right hand corner and i want it as an icon in the dock. parallels has one for the dock built in but i dont like the non-changeabe icon and wish to build my own. so in short i need the code to open the Windows Start Menu if it was a windows xp, so that i can take that code and modify it to run on my mac.

Answer 1

A suitable alternative goal may be to figure out how to send Ctrl-Esc. Microsoft Windows will interpret that as a request to pull up the start menu.

I don't have, handy and conveniently available to me, a Mac with Parallels 7 installed. So there might be some conflicts there that I'm just not aware of, due toan inability to test. But, I do provides one solution to handle things from within the Microsoft Windows side of things.

The term "keyboard stuffing" (or "keyboard stuffer") is a general term to describe the functionality of having software make the operating system act like a keystroke was pressed. I know AutoHotKey has support for such a thing, though I don't readily have all of the details to quickly prsent you with an entire solution going that route.

I just accomplished this by using JP Software's Take Command (TCC) Lite Edition (TCC/LE). (At the time of this writing, the latest version of TCC/LE is 13.04.63, older than the latest versions of TCC. It could be that TCC/LE has been effectively discontinued, but it did work for the task when I tried it today.)

Actually, during some quick testing I did have some troubles getting this to work when I tried to do this from CMD, by running TCC and having TCC directly run KSTack. I suspect that it is related to a race condition, where TCC ends before Keystack completes the process of getting the keystroke sent. I resolved that by creating two batch files. C:\Temp\SendCE.BTM said:

@KeyStack " " Ctrl-Esc
@Pause

And C:\Temp\SendCE.BAT said:

"%ProgramFiles%\JPSoft\TCCLE13x64\tcc.exe" /C C:\Temp\SendCE.BTM

I was using TCC/LE 64-bit from within Win7 64-bit. (That shouldn't matter, but I mention it as a point of reference to my working and tested implementation.)