>Thanks for the background. I confused shortcuts and PIFs because the only way I know to make a PIF under W95+ is to make a shortcut and manipulate its properties. There no longer seems to be a PIF editor a la Win3x...
>

I've got a hunch it's just out of reach in the registry. Maybe there's something in the WMI...

>> I'd appreciate any ideas, even just the address of a good hit man in Vancouver...
>
>I thought everyone knew there are no hit men in Vancouver... or even in Canada, for that matter < g >
>

We've been having them practice crossing international borders for a whole year now!

>An idea almost as evil (would probably qualify for BOFH status if you were to try it) would be to run multiple instances of W2K on top of VMWare.

Actually, it's not that far from what I came up with - I thought about running Linux and hosting FPDOS under WINE...