Is there a way to have the program run as a windows application normally but show a console if the help argument is passed?
For what you want, learn about using command line arguments here. Basically declare Main to accept arguments as an array of string:
static void Main(string[] args) Use a simple dialog form to display the help message or even a MessageBox which is a very simple dialog form.
This gives you much better control rather than trying to cobble something together that wasn't really meant to be put together.