>>It's there, but if it's O2K, it's able to heal itself. And you can test for the key and try to fire the tool via an API call that doesn't smoke the environment if your user did their damnedest tomake it break. And, if it's O2K, it now knows how to fix it so it works...
>
>either I'm not really the one with the low coherent factor tonight, or I just need to go bed. This makes no sense to me Ed. Jeff & Erik's approach seems the way go here but what the heck to do i know.

Find a file association linked to an automation object - like .XLS, and launch the document usinging ShellExecute(). If something won't instantiate the object, you get a trappable, easy to identify, 1000000% silent return from ShellExecute() saying "Waaaah - I'm broke." No error handler - the ShellExecute() handles you back a return code. Now if it's O2k, you can launch the freaking installer and "Go fix yerself, annoy the crap out of the idjit who blew away the filesystem." That's the single biggest benefit to O2K from my perspective - if it gets broke, it can at least try to fix itself before screaming for Papa Ed or Mamma Rox to go fix the thing by figuring out what's missing. It already knows, at least in theory, tells you to get out CD # 36 of 4,297 and Click "OK" - and I've tested the standard stupid enduser tricks of yanking a subdirectory over to some other tree on the drive, or firing up DELTREE in the wrong place.