Some programs belong in Control Panel, being configuration tools, but are not supplied in the special format required to be Control Panel applets.

Applets are a special type of DLL written in a way that Windows recognises and interacts with and lists in the Control Panel folder.

YourCPL is a Control Panel applet designed to extract information from normal programs and a configuration file, and present it to Windows. The combination of ordinary program and generic applet enables anything that can be put on a command line to be represented in Control Panel.

In the above screen shot you can see that I have added Regedit.exe in Windows XP.

Copy YourCPL.cpl and YourCPLconfig.txt to the Windows system folder:

\Windows\System on most Win9x and ME systems
\WinNT\System32 on NT/2000
\Windows\System32 on XP

Edit YourCPLconfig.txt with Notepad. Lines that start with a semicolon are ignored:

; This is a comment

Note that the ; must be the first character on the line.

Other lines specify one program each, in this format:

Path to program[press Tab key]Icon caption (31 characters max.)[press Tab key]Descriptive text (63 characters max.)[press tab key]Command line arguments

That's one line unwrapped. Command line arguments are optional. All other fields are obligatory.

Examples are given in the text files in the download package along with further comments, troubleshooting tips and special notes for Windows 7.