>>>Isn't there a way, perhaps using a Windows API, to exit a program and tell Windows to immediately restart it?
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>>Why do you want to do this?
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>Someone asked me this same question awhile back about another issue. I must confess to not understanding why the question has to be asked (at least without the inclusion of a suggestion, which gives it a different feel). I end up feeling like I have to justify why I want to do it prior to getting an answer. I have no problem with the question itself, but when it's asked alone, I just end up wondering.
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>Anyway, the answer is that the program has done an auto-update and must restart to run the latest version.

I think everybody here who has ever answered a technical question has had this dilemma - whether to ask "what the {underworld placeholder} do you need that for" or not. If you ask, there are several possible outcomes: you come across as a rude old colleague too trigger-happy to rub rookie's nose with yet another "this is the way to do it, what you tried is getting you nowhere"; the story you'll get may be much more than you wanted to know; you open a nasty can of worms; you actually had a good hunch that the question was about truck refueling at 60mph while the underlying problem didn't really need any trucks and could be solved on a bike.

If you don't ask, you may be unnecessarily polite, and actually fail to point to the cause of the problem. See the other thread today, about var1...var15, that's a classic example. A little digging usually gets better results; since in Fox everything can be done at least three ways, one of the other ways may actually suit the situation much better.

I usually try to answer the initial question (avoiding the words "original question" - usually they aren't too original, we saw it all before ;) and try to hint that with more information we may come to a better solution.

So when The Question is asked, I assume we've already tried to solve the problem as presented, and it didn't work. We are taking a step back to see the larger picture - that's the purpose of it. It's not really "why are you doing it this way" (and none of the implied "are you nuts"? is there), it's more "what are you trying to achieve, maybe we can get there some other way".

I mean, nobody questions anyone's motives - you wouldn't be doing any of it if it wasn't required for something. It's just that if we don't have a better hammer for the nail, with some extra background knowledge, we may be able to suggest screws, or bolts, or glue, or soldering, or welding...