Starting Privoxy with Vidalia

Vidalia and Privoxy often run together, but if you don't have them both running all the time then it's convenient to get Vidalia to start Privoxy automatically when Vidalia itself has been started. (As a side benefit, this will also cause Privoxy to be stopped automatically when Vidalia is exited.) This can be accomplished via an option on the General tab of Vidalia's settings, where you can choose to Start a proxy application when Vidalia starts.

If you only set the Proxy Executable to point to privoxy.exe then it won't work because Privoxy will complain about being unable to find its settings. This is because it's looking for its config file in the Vidalia directory. You can fix this by adding a Command Line Argument consisting of the full path to the config file, eg. "C:\\Program Files\\Vidalia Bundle\\Privoxy\\config.txt"

However, Privoxy still won't start, because the config file will, by default, look for its "child" config files in the wrong place. So, the final thing to change is to edit Privoxy's config.txt to set the confdir to the full path of Privoxy, eg. confdir C:\Program Files\Vidalia Bundle\Privoxy

All of this fiddling could be avoided if Vidalia understood shortcut files. The shortcut would let you set the directory that Privoxy would be run from, and would also let you start Privoxy minimised.

Note that Vidalia and Privoxy are both multi-platform packages, but my instructions are for Windows only.