You may consider using TameDOS program from http://www.tamedos.com/.

>Hi,
>
>I have a DOS box running on a Win2K workstation and if I fire it up at the same time as a VFP app, the DOS box seems to always take precedence. That is, both apps are running unattended and they look for printout to "calculate" and print but if the DOS app is running, the VFP app never seems to find anything - or it finds it after quite a few minutes after it should have and then it does its calculations *very* slowly. So it seems like the DOS box is hogging all the CPU time.
>
>I tried setting a registry setting that I had set on another server but it did not help (this setting is supposed to give foreground windows equal billing with background ones). It was:
>
>hkey_local_machine\system\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl\Win32PrioritySeparation
>
>and changing its value from 38 to 0.
>
>Anything else I could look for?
>
>Albert