>The app checks an ftp site every 15 minutes looking for files with an ls command. If there are no files on the server the command never returns. To work around this I set a time out and could test the status property, if it was 18 then there were no files so it just returns. This was under Win95. Now under Win2k the status is always 18 even if there were files available.

That's difficult when behavior changes across OS's. I am assuming this all has to be done remotely. Any chance of putting an application on the server itself to perform the task(s) so it doesn't have to go remote? I am having to work on a SQL Server SP now to do a similar sort of task.