Heya. I am looking for a way to have two processes communicate to each other in Windows XP, but I am uncertain which path to use as there seem to be many methods for IPC. I've been leaning toward named pipes, but the documentation online is rather scarce and incomplete. There are only two processes in the plan (both written in C++), one of them being windowless. The GUI process should be able to control the windowless one using IPC and they'll need to transfer over certain commands and small bits of data to each other. Any suggestions?

*bump*

This is as far as I managed to get with named pipes.
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=468573

I've taken an interest in named pipes because of a recommendation from a more experiended coder. Both, the server and client should only run on a local computer i.e. there is no need for a remote connection.
The GUI application (the server) spawns the windowless client on request. The client then attempts to connect to the server and begins the data exchange. Should the connection fail (e.g. server is absent), the client automatically terminates. The client cannot run on its own and it relies on the server for commands. This is merely the concept of the final application and I am currently in the state to get the IPC going.
Please note that the following code is only a prototype for the IPC part. Just split it into files and you should be able to compile it. You have to execute the server.exe and then the client.exe manually.

Server: http://pastebin.com/m683c29b1
Client: http://pastebin.com/m5e95d9eb

I've managed to get the data to flow in one direction at a time by commenting out certain write/read parts of the code, but both applications freeze when trying to read and write to the pipe on both sides (server and client-side) at the same time.