I'd rather only have one force_hide option that does its best to hide everything.

Yes, it's probably unintuitive for GUI apps, it might even be maliciously misused, but it does have occasional legitimate uses. And besides, an app can easily ignore SW_HIDE if it wants.

Bear in mind that the test suite should (mostly) operate without ctypes. So if you use ctypes to verify the test, make it a separate test that skips if ctypes cannot be imported, and have a test that runs it without verifying the window is actually hidden. That way we always at least _run_ the code, even if we only (usually) verify that it's actually hiding the window.