>Can somebody give me a high level explanation of how I might do this...
>
>I want to create an exe that runs as a process and not an application. For example, I don't want this .exe to show up in the Applications tab of the Task Manager.
>
>My plan is to have an icon in the system tray where the user can right click and control through the context menu, similar to the Volume Control icon or MSN Messenger (both of which actively run but don't show in the Applications tab).

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a "process". If you just don't want it to show in the taskbar, you can create a normal WinForms app. and set the "ShowInTaskbar" of the form to false. If you mean you want it to automatically start when the machine boots and always runs in the background, you would want to create a Windows service. The only downside to a service is that it can't have any UI - that means you'd actually need two projects - one for the service (which does the real work) and the other to let you configure the .config file and/or communicate with the service via some mechanism (named pipes/WCF, writing to a shared filed, etc.).