Tracy, yes, there are a variety of ways to do this. The one I just sent to Hilmar uses a custom C++ dll to call a background process. The trick is to keep track of that process. I don't think that example had it, but, you can also use the WaitForSingleObject API to track if the process completes successfully...
>I tend to do this using shellexecute() but maybe someone else has a better idea? We have some functions that can be run while other processes are ocurring so those are written into separate .exes which are then run as background processes. You really have to be careful though to make sure you separate the processes so both .exes don't try to use the same files (unless that is ok) etc... I recently got an example from Claude Fuchs on using createprocess() to do this which seems to be cleaner and faster than shellexecute() since my understanding is that shellexecute() actuallly calls createprocess().