Is it possible to use IPC inside of a IE8 Browser Helper Object?

Question

I need to communicate with a Service using IPC from inside of a Browser Helper Object (registered with IE8). Unfortunately, all of this communication is done through an Assembly API that I have no control over. Whenever this API starts up I get the following error:

ExceptionSystem.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingException: Failed to connect to an IPC Port: The system cannot find the file specified.

I realize that it is difficult to discern what the issue is without source. However I am curious if anyone knows of anything sort of permissions or DLL issues that would prevent IPC from working in this case.

Answer 1

It looks like this issue can be caused by a number of things.

UAC, as always, can be an issue and should be disabled to make sure it isn't causing problems.

The other issue is that IE allocates a process for the main frame as well as individual tabs. This means that there is no guarantee that your BHO is in the main frame process. If you set the following registry key, IE will prevent the browser from allocating extra tab processes:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]"TabProcGrowth"=dword:00000000

In general, neither of these solutions are ideal though. I ended up backing away from this entire attempt as it seems very problematic from a number of angles.