Windows client does not display on taskbar during startup #3282

During the startup of Bitcoin-qt on Windows, (which is extremely slow, usually taking several minutes to start), the standard taskbar icon for the running program does not display, making it impossible to ALT-TAB back to the Bitcoin program's startup dialog until the several-minute startup process completes. In other words, Bitcoin-qt basically disappears the moment you switch to another window.

It should be trivial to toggle a flag on the startup window created to make it show up on the taskbar. I haven't programmed Win32 in a while but I know it was basically a checkbox in Visual Studio last time I did it.

Test system: Windows XP SP3 32-bit, all updates, Bitcoin-qt 0.8.5, 7200 RPM hard drive, 4GB RAM, Core i5 760 quad core at 4.0GHz

For Qt I'd expect this to be one of the window flags, but I can't find it http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qt.html#WindowType-enum Maybe the splash screen window type never gets a taskbar entry, in which case you'd have to change the type of window.

IMHO it is intended that you don't have a taskbar entry during startup, you have the tray-icon and the splash screen. I agree that it would be nice to show-hide the splashscreen when clicking the tray-icon (just like with the main-window once loaded). Btw. Word 2013 also has no taskbar entry during startup :).

Btw. clicking a QSplashScreen closes the splash, this is by design AFAIK. We could disallow clicking it by intercepting that event, but I'm not sure (yet) this is the right thing...

The advantage of a taskbar entry is that everyone knows that it can be used to show/hide a window. In #3928 you propose to make clicking the tray icon to show/hide the splash screen, but that's not very intuitive (to me at least).

We could override the click event for the splash screen to minimize instead of completely closing it.

Also if we want to show initialization progress in the taskbar entry (through either Ubuntu LauncherAPI or Windows Taskbar API), we need a taskbar entry :-)

But on the other hand, making a click on the taskbar icon re-show the splash screen is probably as easy as connecting a signal, and making sure DeleteOnClose is not set on the splash. Right now, the tray icon does nothing while the splash screen is active (which is not intuitive either). So no matter what is decided here it may be a good idea.

Why isn't bitcoin-qt like litecoin-qt, which shows a splash screen the moment it starts, including the loading and verifying of blocks (whereas bitcoin-qt shows the splash screen only after these lengthy processes have completed)?

@rebroad That is the case, did you ever try? And what do you think is the base of L-Qt???

Here, the splash screen shows up immediately after running the executable, and shows progress for loading and verifying of blocks (and other initialization stages). If this doesn't happen then something is wrong. Can you create a new issue for this? And make an attempt to explain clearer what the problem is, and under what conditions it happens, which platform, etc.

@laanwj Not sure what you mean by "this". Can we find out what was done to Litecoin-Qt to enable the splash screen to appear sooner? I'm not currently experienced enough with Qt to spot which commit it was, but I'll try to find out.

(It would help if someone could tell me how to fork litecoin on github when I've already forked bitcoin).

@rebroad Single-step through main() up until the point where it shows the splash screen to see where it takes so long.

Closing in favor of #4644 which describes the problem more generally.