Originally posted by Jim Sachs
You can't really blame MS for this one (believe me, I'd love to blame them for everything -- including Global Warming!). They have built all the hundreds of lines of code into the OS for clicking, dragging and resizing windows. The key to all this is the window border. When you click into a window, the border lights up -- you know that window is active and all keystrokes and mouse movements are directed to that window. The WS_THICKFRAME argument turns all this on when calling the CREATEWINDOW function.
The windows themeing community often uses the trick to make the window border just 1 pixel. This way it looks slick but keeps the border functionality.
I don't know if it's possible to define this for just one application. A windows theme affects all applications.
example:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/4560044/
(if anyone wants to try this theme you need the program "stylexp". You can get a trial version here:
http://www.tgtsoft.com/download.php)