Thank you Joel.

Can you help me understand why an MT DLL cannot spawn an EXE?

Per your suggestion, assume I make a separate EXE COM server, independent of the MT DLL. In my situation, the MT DLL needs to remain loaded within IIS processs space because of performance issues. Then...
1. Will the DLL be able to instantiate the EXE COM server once registered with regsvr32? (I don't see why not but I don't want to take anything for granted).
2. Will this EXE COM server in turn be able to spawn off other command-line EXE's such as my Info-Zip utilities, and also spawn off BAT files and the like?

Thanks again.

>Yes, it won't work unless you make the .exe an exe COM server. Once you make it an EXE Com Server, you create it and call its methods from within the vfp mtdll.