Missing TOC icons in MMC snap-in

Question

Working on the help for a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in application. The merge goes well, and the help itself is fine. The interesting/perplexing part is that if you click on a Help button inside the application, the default TOC book and page icons do not appear. Pressing F1 brings the help up, with the appropriate icons. As required by the MMC, the TOC is binary compiled.
Here's what the TOC looks like when called from a Help button:
Not certain if this is relevant, but this issue was first noted in the company bug database back in 2005, where it was noted that "A binary table of contents is populated based on user demand. For example, in a table of contents where a book is located within another book, the second level book will not be populated until a user clicks it. (Microsoft)"
I am using RoboHelp 8, and the project was imported with settings intact. Is there anything to be done, either inside RH8 or by the developer?
Thanks in advance for all suggestions.
Mike

Answer 1

Hi, Mike,
When I open the .hhc file for the MMC 3.0 Help file in Notepad, I see that none of the TOC styles is explicitly set there. In other words, the five TOC styles that are checked in my screenshot are simply the defaults that are implemented when the Help author has not selected any of the available styles. For what it's worth, this is what you would see at the start of your .hhc file if you have explicitly set the same five TOC styles:
   <OBJECT type="text/site properties">
     <param name="Window Styles" value="0x800025">
   </OBJECT>
where 0x800025 is the sum of the five selected TOC styles (each one has a unique hexadecimal value). In the .hhc file for the MMC Help file, this line is missing.
Here is an old message in which I explained what the hexadecimal value is of each style:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/microsoft.public.helpauthoring/msg/e88393893f0d6c02?hl=en
As you probably know, the binary TOC format supports a very limited set of authoring features, compared to the non-binary TOC format. When you switch to a binary TOC, most of the styles that you might use in a non-binary TOC are unavailable. Still, the binary TOC format does support book and page icons.
Perhaps it might help to test your MMC snap-in with a different Help file, created with a tool other than RoboHelp (FAR in this case). I've uploaded a Help file with a binary TOC to the following location:
http://rapidshare.com/files/292153651/Binary_TOC_Sample.zip.html
If you were to give this file the name of your own file and drop it into the location where MMC expects to find it, you may be able to determine whether the fault lies in the Help file or in the code that your snap-in uses.
Pete