Hi everyone, Universal Thread is the best thing after Fox itself!.

My company has a Web site in which our customers can buy products. Because we charge credit cards with Icverify (modem connected, 10 to 50 seconds to obtain a response), we offload the charging process out of the Web Server. I wrote an small 'Agent' which is basically a form with a timer constantly looking for new records in an table updated every time an order is saved. The 'Agent' is running in another machine, obviously.
That table has the order number, so my form easily
locks the record,
goes to the order, obtains the total,
charges the credit card, updates the necessary tables,
sends an email to the customer with the transaction result and unlocks and deletes the actual record

Everything is working fine (although we had one annoying c000005 error), but I'm wondering for better ways to do it.

First question:
How to 'stimulate' an application to make it process things in real time, as soon and frequently as it is required? Windows messaging? Remote created objects?
What other solutions can you guys recommend/suggest for this kind of problem?
So far, again, mine is:
A table for interchange of 'messages', each message is a new record.
An 'Agent' looking for new records and processing with the info in them.

My second question is:
Do you know a better (faster) way to charge Credit Cards than ours (Icverify modem connected)?

Thanks in advance,
Agustin.