Whatever it uses, it worked me out of a scrape today and I'm grateful....great work, Ed!

>Of course it did! But a hint - it uses CreateProcess() rather than ShellExecute() to run things. There are minor differences; ShellExecute() can launch a document as well as an executable, but CreateProcess() gives you tighter control of the process, and returns some information that allows you to monitor the progress of a launched executable (you can get the same information back using ShellExecuteEx(), but you'd need something like POINTERS or My CLSHEAP library to manage the structure needed by ShellExecuteEx().)