John,

As Sergey mentioned, there are a lot of good ones in the downloads section that you can farm for ideas. The basic concept is to check for a specific EXE file in the same network folder and compare it with the same file name in a local folder. If the local copy isn't there, or has a different date/time stamp, you know you need to copy the network version to the local folder. If a copy needs to be made, put up some kind of window letting the user know the system hasn't gone brain dead. The launchers final task is to ShellExecute the local copy of the executable before clearing events and unloading itself.

In our environment, we use a project hook to automate the build process. This lets us burn in the name of the executable to launch and grab the icon associated with the executable as the launchers icon.

You can do some great stuff with launchers. One of our systems has a check for updates process that hits our FTP server, downloads, unzips, and re-starts itself whenever a new version is available. Some applications periodically check for a new version in the network folder and allow the user to re-start (by ShellExecuting back to the launcher application). Another trick is to pass a specific parameter from the launcher to the application executable and test for that in the application. One little parameter test in the main program is all it takes to keep users from running application directly from the network

Launchers can solve a whole bunch of problems. Give it a shot, it's worth it.