>>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.

So it is the Chicken and Egg problem. I have to start the exe as a DDE in order to get the handle. Right now there is no DDE start so there is no handle. I am letting the operating system bring up what ever the user has defined to handle the tif extension.

oShellExecute = newobject('c40shellexecute','c40utilities','',tcfullTIFpath)
*
* Execute the shell exec command
*
oShellExecute.Execute()
*
* Release the object valiables
RELEASE oShellExecute

Where tcfulltifpath points to the tif image that the user wishes to view