Off topic? Inserting an animated icon in Windows System Tray

[Mary Brune <mbrune -at- ACTIONEER -dot- COM>]

Hello Everyone!

I realize that this question might be  a little off-target for this list,
but I'm in a bit of a pinch and could really use some help.

Here's the scoop: I work for a vastly under-staffed, under-funded,
over-committed startup, and in addition to writing all of our
documentation, I've also been given the task of designing a new icon for
our application that resides in the user's Windows System Tray when our app
is initializing.

That was the easy part. Icon's all designed, it's ready to go. Here's the
problem: the icon I designed is sort of an "unavailable" icon that shows up
while the program is initializing so that the user has some idea of what's
going on. It's animated, too, kind of like those status bars you see when
you install software. Once the program is running, it should be replaced by
a static version of the icon in the tray. Anyway, the regular icon file
type has an extension of .ICO, while this animated version is .ANI. The
developer I'm working with isn't sure how to get the .ANI file to show up
in the tray. She's also got a zillion and one things going on right now, so
I thought I would try to help resolve this issue.  We're shipping this
product very soon, and really need to figure this out.

Does anyone happen to have any experience with this? I know other programs
(like ICQ, for example) use an animated icon in the tray while
initializing, and then switch to the static icon afterward. I'm not a
programmer in any way, so I have no idea how this is done.

Any help is great appreciated. Thanks!!!

Mary Brune
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Technical Publications
Actioneer, Inc.
http://www.actioneer.com
415/536-0709 voice
415/882-4372 fax

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=