I got this working ! mistake was, I did not use memset(&lvItem,0,sizeof(LVITEM)); in the below code snippet LVITEM lvItem; lvItem.mask = LVIF_TEXT | LVIF_PARAM; lvItem.iItem = 0; lvItem.pszText = ""; ListView_InsertItem(m_hWnd, &lvItem); ListView_SetItemText(m_hWnd, 0, 1, "Properties") :-D