Ellen,

You should go to www.west-wind.com and download Rick Strahl's wwipstuff dll and classes. One feature is that you can read web pages from VFP and post information to the web using VFP. I think it would be pretty easy to create a web page that your help desk people could use to get the # and that the VFP application could also access. Then the app could just post info to the page and pull the # out of the response. You wouldn't even need to display the page. You could just tell the user "Updating key..." and do the whole thing transparently.

I'm still inclined to think that this is simple enough to do with straight ASP and doesn't really require a COM server, but it would be a nice little project for your first VFP COM server and I'm sure it would work well.