>Lets suppose that if I detect that the viewer that is in use is say the wang image viewer or the kodak viewer. Can you tell me what calls I would make in order to have it open a drawing using the existing exe that is running. Or is there any calls I could have made ahead of time that would have given me this ability.

Ok, if the app is DDE enabled this should work:

mypicture = "C:\....\mypict.jpg"

= DDEExecute(ddehandle, '[Open("&mypicture")]')

or.. FileOpen instead Open.