Have you ever accidentally clicked on the x button on an application window so that the window was closed as a consequence of this? While it may not happen that often, if you do happen to click on the close button accidentally, you may want to disable the close button of select windows to avoid this from happening.

A program that you can use for that task is NoClose, a free portable software for the Windows operating system that you can use for exactly that purpose.

All you need to do is download the program to your operating system, extract its contents to a folder on your hard drive and run the program from there. Since it is portable, you do not need to install it before you can do that.

The program displays the screen that you see above, which acts both as instructions on how to use the application, and as a resource linking to the author’s homepage and other important websites.

Here is how it works. You basically bring the window to the front that you want to modify the close button of, and hit the Ctrl-1 key to enable or disable the button. This toggles the feature, and also the color of the close button when the window is active to indicate that it has been disabled or enabled.

This stays active until the window is closed and opened the next time. You can use the Ctrl-2 key instead to make it a permanent rule, but only if the NoClose program is running when you open the protected window.

Both the close button and the right-click close context menu option are removed by NoClose. There are still ways to close a program window though, Alt-F4 works for instance, or you could kill the process in the Windows Task Manager.