>>I'm sure it's too late to change now, but why didn't explorer originally store the hotkey information internally?
>[Because RegisterHotKey is a window manager feature, not an Explorer feature. -Raymond]
But launching shortcuts in response to hotkeys *is* an Explorer feature, so Explorer already must have some kind of internal mapping to know which shortcut to launch for which hotkey.
I think I can rationalize the behavior as: Explorer can (and probably does) store that information, but that doesn't help in the case described here, where Explorer wants to activate an existing window if possible. Explorer doesn't necessarily know which window came from which shortcut (if it even was started via a shortcut). It could try comparing the process name to the shortcut's command-line, or it could keep track of the process handle from CreateProcess and see if that corresponds to the window, but neither of those would work in a case where the window was created by a child process or where a single application instance creates multiple top-level windows.
