Here's the scoop... I had this COM object (VFP class) configured to run as the launching user which basically started the server as IUSR_... which doesn't have rights to the iexplore object..

Thanks for your help, it pointed me in the right direction, it was a permissions problem hidden by my "not so good" error handler.
I have configured it to run as the interactive user and that works like a charm.
I don't neccessarily like to have it configured that way because it assumes that a console session must be started( user logged in) on the W2K server this runs on... but I need that anyhow because I use Acrobat PDF writer and that one requires it too.

Thanks much. alex s