Conime Debug Menu?

[Binarystep]

I was playing with Resource Hacker today, when I noticed that conime.exe apparently has a "DEBUGMENU" in it. Though when I try to open ConIME, nothing happens. Any idea of how I can access the menu?

Here's the resource:

DEBUGMENU MENU
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
POPUP "&Debug"
{
MENUITEM "E&xit Console IME", 8002
MENUITEM "Access &Violation on Console IME", 8003
MENUITEM SEPARATOR
MENUITEM "&About Console IME...", 8001
}
}

[DOS]

Sorry, I don't know anything about ConIME, I'm guessing that's because I'm lucky enough that my primary language is English I might have some general advice that would help though.

I don't know how you can display exactly that menu without quite a bit of difficulty, but:

Does ConIME have any other menus that it does display? If so, you might be able to add menu items somewhere in that menu with the same IDs.

Also, with AutoHotkey you could send a WM_COMMAND message to ConIME with the specified ID and that might make ConIME act just the same as if the menu item was picked, if you'd like to know what those menu items do.

Here's an example with Notepad in Windows XP: when I look in a resource editor, I can see that its Help -> About menu item has item ID 65, so I create a file called mytest.ahk with the following content:

Code: Select all

; 0x111 = WM_COMMAND
SendMessage, 0x111, 65,,, Untitled - Notepad

(the first line is a comment, you don't need to include it if you don't want) and, if I open Notepad (which starts out with the window title "Untitled - Notepad") and then double-click on mytest.ahk, Notepad opens its About dialog.

If ConIME doesn't have a window (and hence a title bar to match on), with some extra steps you can still send it a message like this.

[Binarystep]

Uh...my primary language is English too... ._.

Anyway, ConIME does not have any other menus, as it does not open when it is run.

[DOS]

So what's it meant to do? For me, on Windows XP, when I run %WINDIR%\System32\conime.exe, it seems to just exit immediately. Perhaps if your language is not English, then it will stay running?

Maybe monitoring the process using Sysinternals's Process Monitor would reveal something interesting. e.g. I see it is looking for registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\EnableConImeOnSystemProcess, amongst many other things.

Obviously if the application terminates on startup, it would be very hard to send it a message, and it probably wouldn't process it anyway.

[svin83]

Uhhh... tried running it in a command shell?

[DOS]

Uhhh... tried running it in a command shell?

It still exits immediately.

[svin83]

try running it through a debugger, setting some breakpoints, maybe see if an entrypoint coud be edited to go to the debugmenu? (assuming it's a console app)