'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

I actually recently stumbled on this too: RegisterHotKey is a poorly-named function, and MSDN doesn't say mention alternatives in the documentation.

The whole Accelerator business is really tricky, because you have to modify your message loop to LoadAccelerators and TranslateAccelerator before trying to DispatchMessage. There is no other way, but there really should be. It actually took me 2 tries to load accelerators properly before I got them to work. In contrast, RegisterHotKeys is a 2-line modification that just works.

I think that their WinAPI programmer should be reprimanded, but it should be understood that WinAPI is a monster. MFC is also a monster, even though it tries not to be one.