>John, have you considered creating a "tasks" table that specifies procs to be run, with start/finish records broken into manageable chunks? You could use separate fields to record that the task is underway then completed, by which PC. As each PC comes online it SCANs for a record that is neither underway or completed, rlocks it briefly to mark the task underway (if it's still blank), then does the task, then marks it as completed and hunts for another task. That should work whether you have 1 or 100 PCs.

I'm thinking along those lines, but I may have multiple tasks that are to be done,so I may need a coupld of tables, one would be a master control table to determine how many pcs to allocate to a given task, another would have the tasks and the code to run them. For geocoding, I think what i want is to download a subset or records, key, address,lat,long, and a var to indicate true or false for geocoded. Once each machine finishes, it will update the master table. At least that is where I think I want this thing to go....