I have a need to periodically identify records in a table with specific content in specific fields and, when any such are found, send data to a partner company and get a reply back (using WinSock).

The idea would be to run a SQL every nn (say 10) seconds and if records were found, ship them off one-by-one. Connect/send/receive/disconnect for each record. NO UI action whatever in this "process".

Now this "process", I am hopeful, can be a "COM server", set up as a Win2000 "service". This "process" ("service") would be expected to run continually without intervention.

First question, then is: Can this be done?... Can a COM Server do work on behalf of NO ONE, or does it have to be instantiated by someone in order to actually process?

Now the "process" would maintain certain statistics regarding the work performed within it.

I would like some way to "report" the activity of that "process" to a user on a display, using a regular old VFP form.
While I'm confident that I could have the stats put to a table that this other application would read as it needs, I am hopeful that there might be some way to interact with the "process" and get its current statistics for display. The user would intermittently hit a "Update" button on the form to get the latest stats.
So question 2 is: Is there a way to access the statistics being maintained by that "process"? My thought had been to simply have a method that I would call from the form, but then I realized that I would be accessing a separate instance and that any stats would be meaningless.

Thanks in advance