Make Windows programs to launch as many times as needed, avoiding limitations

Question

Some applications can't be launched more than once at a time.

Is there any way to workaround this? And make those programs "think" that there is no other instances of this app working?

Windows 7 32 Bit

Answer 1

In general, no.

Some applications do this as a convenience measure (they assume, say, you don't want multiple instances of a media player application), and some for technical reasons. In general, it's a bad idea to try to skirt around this rule (and I'm not aware of any application that attempts to do this) - a software developer can make great assumptions about the accessibility of files if he or she is guaranteed that no other process is using them.

For example, if my program ensures that only one process can run at a time, it can acquire a read/write lock on certain user files, configuration files, etc. If a second process is allowed to start up, it will fail if it tries to acquire its own read/write lock on already locked files. When this happens it will cause crashes and undefined behaviour in any second copies that start.

To accomplish this you would have to have different executables for each copy you wanted to run, and each would have to be recompiled with a different process ID, presuming that the program you are trying to run has a unique ID, which is common.

The only way this can really be accomplished is by virtualization - but that's not really running 2 copies of a program - it's running a copy on 2 separate computers.