[Snood]

I am working on a test setup for my media centre. I'm just using a virtual machine for now until I get the go-ahead from the other half to buy the hardware. I'm still undecided as to whether i will use windows 7 or 8. One thing I am certain about is that I will be using XBMC Launcher. I started playing with the settings a couple of days ago. What i'd really like to be able to do is use XBMC Launcher as shell then run explorer in the background after XBMC so that I can switch to windows immediately, or directly launch a browser using winkey+number etc...

I have put explorer into application1 and have the following options enabled:

Start XBMC when windows starts
Start XBMC when windows resumes from sleep
Start applications with XBMC launcher

Unfortunately the behaviour isn't quite what i'd really like and to be honest I don't know if what I want it currently or ever possible. When windows boots it loads XBMC, Great start! mext explorer loads, but not in the background, I Get the start screen (windows 8) and after a short while it returns to XBMC. If I then open chrome (winkey+3, it's the third item pinned to my taskbar) it briefly loads and then XBMC regains focus.

I tried to solve this by enabling "check focus only once", it works but when I exit chrome, XBMC is visible but so is the windows taskbar overlaid.

So there's a couple of issues for me:

1) if i put explorer.exe as an application to load, I can't get it to load completely hidden

2) I can't seem to get a satisfactory behaviour with other launched programs and successfully returning to XBMC without the windows taskbar overlaid. Perhaps it might be possible to add exclusions to XBMC having focus, if for example, chrome is running, don't retake focus but if it isn't, give xbmc focus. might it be possible to do this with the start menu also?

Any advice or comments would be welcomed, for all I know this can already be achieved and I'm being a retard.