Focus indicator not showing after keyboard interaction

Question

I have a legacy Win32 application written in C, which is giving me trouble with regard to the keyboard focus indicator. This behavior is not seen with a small MFC application. In particular, the keyboard focus is not shown for controls. This is most obvious
with a combo box with the droplist style, but is true of all controls.
I use the ComCtrl32v6 manifest to use modern controls.
I know about the Control Panel setting which turns on accelerator key and keyboard focus once the user interacts with the application in a particular way. With that setting Off, my understanding is that keyboard focus indicators are not shown until the user
tabs between controls. And in fact, that is what I see with a small MFC application. But with my full legacy application, even tabbing between controls does not cause the focus indicator to appear.
I suspect there is some interaction with the message loop I am using (though I am essentially doing GetMessage()/TranslateMessage()/DispatchMessage()). I say this because of some of the other questions I have read on this forum having to do with focus indicators
and TAB key. Though I am not mixing COM or .NET with my C application.
Is there some Win32 function I can call that tells Windows, "This application is being controlled by the keyboard, please show the various visual indicators"? Or some message I can respond to? Or anything?
Now for the really strange bit. This behavior depends on how I start the application! If I start the application with a mouse click (either double-clicking a desktop shortcut, or clicking the Go icon in Visual Studio, or clicking the OK button on the Start->Run
dialog), then I don't get focus indicators. But if I start the application with keystrokes (typing into a command prompt, pressing F5 within Visual Studio, pressing Return from the Start->Run dialog), then the focus indicators show up just fine.
Thoughts? Help?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Is there some Win32 function I can call that tells Windows, "This application is being controlled by the keyboard, please show the various visual indicators"? Or some message I can respond to? Or anything?
Have you try something like this? Handling WM_KEYDOWN message:
case WM_KEYDOWN:
if(pMsg->wParam== VK_TAB){
SetFocus(hwndctrl);
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms646312(v=vs.85).aspx
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