>Ed,
> thanks for your input. You might have missed the part where I said I actually purchased it some time ago. We purchased a license to distribute it with our product. The price was dependent on how may copies you were going to distribute. Because we had grand visions of the sales at the time, I'm sure we still haven't run over the number we purchased. We orginally used it to distribute the DOS version of our program.

You're right, I did miss that, and apologize if I inadvertently grouped you in with the myriad of not-so-stand-up guys who shipped PKZIP and PKUNZIP with commercial software without paying the royalty. Your licensing should allow you to ship a version of PKZIP and PKUNZIP branded with your serial number as I remember,so it should be quite clear to your users that you're playing by the rules and supporting the shareware concept.

I still hate the DOS box; you can use API_APPRUN to run it minimized, and I've discovered a bit of magic, at least under Win2K; when the DOS app finishes, if Close on Exit is not checked for the DOS PIF default, Win2K prepends the string [Inactive in front of the name of the executable, either the default or the one assigned by the lpTitle parameter if that's used with CreateProcess(). You can use this with FindWindow() to spot when the app completes, and use PostMessage() to send a Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break to the hWnd of the inactive DOS process - and the DOS box closes without further user interaction. It'll be making its way into the next release of API_APPRUN, due out shortly, along with some other capabilities based on a more complete implementation of the STARTUPINFO structure leveraged off CLSHeap.