>>>We would like to be able to implement instant messaging. Something that would function in both Novell 3.12 and NT. We don't want to use a looping process which is constantly checking for a file(s) in each users inbox, which probably will eat up a lot of CPU time. We would like to use something similar to what Strahl is doing with west-wind. Have a process running in the back ground. When the user is ready to send an instant message the message is deposited into that user's inbox and a message is sent to that process which tells the user they have a message or even pops up the message.
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>>Sure, I'll play devil's advocate here... why couldn't you use a shared table, and check it using a timer? My understanding is the timer control is not a CPU hog.
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>Maybe. How often would you fire the timer?

That depends entirely on you - what you consider "instant". A long time ago I read about a user-interface study that concluded that users think anything that takes more than 2 seconds to respond is "slow".

OTOH, you may find that the users of your proposed system might consider 15 or 30 seconds perfectly good enough for a messaging app. YMMV.