I'd strongly recommend that anyone attending the session Wednesday evening download CLSHEAP from the Win32 and Other APIs area of the Files Section (File #9482 Heap allocation class)beforehand if they don't have a copy; the session will reference the class code, and at a minimum, a passing familiarity with the methods for the class will be helpful, as is the general reference information on Win32 memory management in the comments for the class. I'd rather have been able to start by saying "OK, since everyone here has read all of Jeff Richter's Advanced Windows, we can dig right in and deal with VFP's manipulation of the memory address space", but it's an unlikely assumption to make. I'd suggest this as a canonical text on the underpinnings of Win32, but it's unlikely that you'll get through it before Wednesday evening if you've never read it before.

I will be discussing the STARTUPINFO structure used by the CreateProcess() family of API calls as an example of a structure using pointers; if you have access to the MSDN documentation, it'd be worth having the API definition at hand, if not, it's available on-line from msdn.microsoft.com in the docs for the Platform SDK. If you're not C-literate, but are passingly familiar with VB's API implementation, it's outlined in detail in Dan Appleman's Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Win32 API in Chapter 14, Processes and Threads in the source code for Launch.vbp on pp 1129-1130, and again in Appendix B.