Trigger with keyboard and mouse inactivity

Chat software like MSN Messenger often have a facility to detect the users "away" status. This is basically done by when there is no keyboard/mouse input for a pre-specified period of time. I have no professional Windows programming experience, and I want to know if there are ready made APIs (loosing platform independence is ok in my particular deployment) that will detect mouse and keyboard inactivity.

Java can only monitor events happening within the Java VM. So if I have my Frame minimized, no AWTevents/Mouse/Keyboard events are detected even though I may still be at my desk.

Is there code out there that I can use that internally handles all the Windows stuff, but has a nice Java Wrapper that I can call?

TIA,

Carlos

[766 byte] By [carlosnf] at [2007-9-26 4:09:32]