When Origin starts, even minimised, it displays the splash screen for a few seconds. It also pops up the dialog boxes showing the progress of the data load, which stay there for some time since the data is a few million elements. Can I eliminate these annoyances?

Also, is there a way to specify the process priority of Origin at startup so that it can run at low priority? It takes longer to obtain and process the data than to plot it, so time isn't a problem. Obviously I can manually change the process priority after startup, but that gets tedious.

I don't want to keep Origin hanging about in the background, which would solve the priority and splash screen issues, for two reasons;

1) It is possible that two programs will require Origin sessions at the same, or overlapping, times,

If you are running Origin 6.0 try using the /h command line switch at launch time. That's launch not lunch! This will hide the splash screen and possibly any import progress dialog boxes. It does not hide the Script Window, Results Log, Project Explorer, or Tips of the Day so these will need to be closed in an earlier instance of Origin (the open/close state of these objects is remembered across instances of Origin). The command to launch Origin would be similar to

C:\Origin60\Origin60.exe /h

Versions earlier than Origin 6.0 do not support the /h command line switch.

Origin does not currently support programmatic control of its process priority. However, I will forward the suggestion to our developers.

Finally, I understand that there is a Windows constraint that you can not start two instances of an Origin DDE server at once but as far as I know there is no reason why one instance of Origin can not simultaneously serve two client applications. Also, when finished serving client applications you can loop on and delete all existing datasets using the LabTalk script

doc -e S {delete %C;};

I Hope this is helpful.