A utility to stagger processes at Windows Startup

Introduction

StartProcessesInOrder.exe is a utility for starting a number of processes at staggered time interval during Windows startup.

This utility was written to meet the needs of my companies servers. The servers start several COM based applications during startup. Launching them all together sometimes resulted in initialization errors as well as delaying mission critical processes while they competed for resources with less important processes.

The utility is simple, it uses an ini file to define what processes are to be submitted. Then it uses a timer to submit the processes at staggered intervals. The utility uses very little system resources to do its work.

The utility consist of two main functions.

1. LoadProcesses which loads items from StartProcessesInOrder.ini (sample in zip)
2. LaunchProcesses which submits processes when appropriate

It does not check to see if a process started, it does check to see if the exe existed before submitting it.

Note. This code was not plagiarized from any other source. I maintain no rights or restrictions upon it. The source was written in VC 5.0.