bcnubes

Thanks everybody for the responses. Great to have such an active forum. GUISetAccelerators() looks like what I am after. Yashied- those examples look very useful. I don't even come close to understanding them at this point but hopefully after playing with them for a while I might start to understand. Thanks again guys!

I am new to Autoit and am just getting the hang of it. This seems so generic I can't seem to find it anywhere. I set hotkeys 0-9 to be a certain color for the background and keys + and - to reverse the black/white. These keys are just swapping out a premade image with the colors. Pressing 1 loads a gif image that is black with white, pressing 2 loads a gif that is red and white, 3 blue and white... pressing - swaps it to white and black, red and black, blue and black... Anywho, I thought I was doing everything great and got things swapping just fine but then noticed that these hotkeys remain even if I minimze the application. So when I run my script and hit 2+ it works fine but then I minimze and try to go to calculator the hotkeys are still being captured by Autoit. How can I set it to only capture when the Autoit script is running? Looked at WinWait and WinActive... but they don't look like it. F1 is the same thing. I want F1 to open my help file but if I minimize and go to Excel it should open Excel's help file. This seems like it would be a Windows wide setting. Pressing F1 in each application brings up the application specific help file. Should I not be using hotkeys? Is there another way to capture key strokes?