>>>I don't see much of a point in considering a performance hit. Whatever you call with shellexecute() will surely last at least one order of magnitude longer than the registration of the call. Not that anyone calls this in a tight loop. And then, even if someone would, well, declare just before the loop.
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>All true and right. Note that I limited the quote to only the part I was commenting this time. The thread is already getting rich, so I'm trying to separate this subthread from the main branch.

IIRC it was Rick who had found his standard code took a perf hit with due to declare dll "standard" he used. Certainly correct you can eliminate such problems - after you found them ;-)

IMHO better to depend on a standard giving you security and speed -
which due to function lookup sequence happens here.
And yes, I realize that # of vfp functions will rise that way.

regards