>Depends how you call the tedious/queued part. If you call it via a DO or function call in Primary, it would still be running in the same thread (i.e. synchronous). It would need to be started separately through an OS/API call (i.e. asynchronous).

That's why I mentioned the queue app, because it runs as a separate exe in all scenarios I saw so far.

>Laptops tend to have slow hard drives so if you speed test you might need to make sure you've got lots of free RAM and your data get cached.

I wasn't concerned with speed that much - just wanted to know whether the load would be spread.

>A lot of work goes into modern OS schedulers which load balance automagically to the best of their ability - and which generally do a pretty good job. I think processor affinity can be specified, but I don't know how, or if it can be done through ShellExecute() - I think Thomas has some knowledge in this area.

Well, let's hope he chimes in here.