Hi,

This weekend, I tried to run a polipo proxy as background task on Windows 7. That’s not that easy, because I did not want to have a dos-command-prompt-window open, even if it was minimized, but wanted it to be hidden.

First, I tried to set it up as a service, however, for some reason that did not work (even if I used the Windows XP Resource Kit-tool srvany.exe), because for some reason it did not want to start the polipo.exe. Alsow, the daemonize-parameter also did not work on Windows 7 (it crashed the proxy).

Then I tried to start it as Windows task that has to be run at startup -> that did the trick. With a little help (thanks to David March, see http://www.mail-archive.com/polipo-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg00487.html) I found out, that it is best run with following parameter entries in the Windows tasks-screen:

• Trigger: Startup
• Action – program/script: cmd
• Action – Arguments/Parameters: /c cmd start cmd /c “”path\to\polipo.exe” -c /path/to/config”

The crucial thing about this is that there should be no blanks in the path to polipo (eg. instead of “C:\Program Files” use “c:\Progra~1” – good old dos-style) and the path to the config file has to be in *nix style (so, instead of “C\Program Files\Polipo\config” you have to omit the c: and only use /progra~1/polipo/config).

Well, that did the trick (maybe that would then also have worked with .vbs, which I tried as well and also did not want to work on my PC.