Reenable (windows)keys after another program has disabled it

Question

Quake3 has disabled the alt and windows keys. Is there any way to reenable them even while quake3 is running? I need those keys even while i have the game open.

They way i think it works is that the game registers a hotkey using RegisterHotKey and then set the handled property to true every time the key is pressed. So if you use UnRegisterHotkey on these keys on the quake3-window i guess the keys will start working again. The problem is that you have no idea what hotkey-id the disabled keys have.

Is there any way to enumerate the hotkeys that a window has registered to get all the hotkey-ids?

Answer 1

It's quite likely that Quake3 doesn't bother with RegisterHotKey at all, but instead uses DirectInput. In that case, it quite likely holds the keyboard in exclusive mode, which explains why the Windows key doesn't work - it's the OS which disables it. Quoting MSDN : "In exclusive mode, the Windows logo key is always disabled."