I have an hourly scheduled set of commands that take between 15 and 20 minutes to complete on my work PC. I found out how to automatically start the cmd with the console minimized. Just recently I discovered how to get rid of the window entirely using Win32::GUI:

@perl -MWin32::GUI -e "$dos = Win32::GUI::GetPerlWindow() ; Win32::GUI::Hide($dos)"

Now I would like to find a or write a small NotifyIcon application to which other processes can talk and change either the icon or the tooltip in order to report the status of those processes running in the hidden console window.