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 Launching 5250 Emulator (.hod) Without Opening OpenConsole.exe – IBM i Access v1.1.9.5

Ismet Othman's profile image
Ismet Othman posted Fri June 06, 2025 02:57 AM

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a way to launch a 5250 emulator session (via a .hod shortcut saved on the Desktop) without automatically opening OpenConsole.exe, as shown in the screenshot below.

Alternatively, is there a method to close the Open Console window after launching the 5250 emulator, without terminating the emulator session itself?

Any suggestions or workarounds would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Marius le Roux's profile image
Marius le Roux IBM Champion

Hi Ismet, 

I am going to assume you recently updated either Java or Windows and this happened right? 

One thing you can try is to go to the IBM i Access Client Solutions program under Tools -> File Associations to try to see if that resolves?


The other part that bit me personally was that I set my Default Console on the Windows Terminal, this made things go crazy on my system, for this I ended up reinstalling ACS unfortunately to fix  the internal keys and such (hope yours does not get to that stage). 


Here are some of posts experiencing the same :
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/discussion/access-client-shortcuts-and-files-will-not-open-with-windows-11
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/discussion/windows-11-24h2-breaks-acs-shortcuts 


HTH

Bryan Dietz's profile image
Bryan Dietz

Maybe using the Plugin would help you.  the below is from the Getting Started documentation

9.1.18 Console

/PLUGIN=console /SYSTEM=<system>

This plug-in starts a 5250 console to the specified system.

This function is equivalent to 5250 Console from the main GUI.

Ismet Othman's profile image
Ismet Othman

Hi Marius and Bryan,

Thank you both for taking the time to respond to my question.

After reviewing the link Marius shared (https://community.ibm.com/community/user/discussion/access-client-shortcuts-and-files-will-not-open-with-windows-11), I came across another discussion within the same thread that offers a solution to this issue.

It turns out that preventing the terminal window from opening when launching the 5250 emulator involves just a few simple steps. Here's what needs to be done:


Cheers,

Ismet

Marius le Roux's profile image
Marius le Roux IBM Champion

Well spotted , Ismet. 

Glad we could solve it together as a community effort 😂

Ismet Othman's profile image
Ismet Othman

Appreciate it Marius! Always awesome to see the community come together like this 💪