>George,
>
>Thanks I was too lazy to fire up 6 and build an exe, hopefully his code will scan for the string which may move with any particular release of VFP.

This is one of those instances where some real problems could arise. I don't know if the low level file functions could be used on a network, for example, where the EXE was in use. While you can control the access, I haven't tried to see if the mode was shared by default. FILETOSTR() is another story. If you wanted you could place the contents of VFP6.EXE in a string from the command window.