>Thanks for the replies and links. I've gotten more comments on this post than any question I've ever asked so I'm entergized to finally resolve this issue. I'm sure the answer is somewhere in all of the ideas presented here.
>
Just to make sure you have ample options flooding your testing, have you considered "shelling out" to another exe via com (which runs in it's own timesliced process) and call your prg's from there ? A couple COM-Exe could stay launched to stop the focus switch. Check poolmanager example (at least that was it in vfp6, dunno if it is still found under that particular name<g>.

HTH

thomas