>Unless you do something to specifically prevent the operating system from gaining control (such as setting the priority class of a process to real-time, and then never do anything to retrun control to the OS kernel), Windows is always 'multitasking'...

I agree, and wasn't disputing this fact. I was just trying to clarify something for Charlie in the original message, which indicated that he thought it was VFP that was causing multiple threads to use "timeslicing", and not something inherent in the way multiprocessing works.

> You might want to take a look at some of the reference materials I suggested for Jim; Jeff Richter's Advanced Windows and the Multitasking Overview in the Visual C++ docs in the MSDN give a good portrayal of what multiprocessing, multitasking and multithreading mean; while both sets of references are easier reads if you know a little C, they're comprehensible without detailed knowlege of C and the WIn32 APIs.

Thanks for the recommendation, Ed. I'm not sure how much I'll get out of those references, but I'll take a look at them.