For file change notification - I agree 100%. Polling for that is never a good idea IMHO. If he is polling every second, and his process of zip/unzip takes 2, and he isn't disabling the timer during the process, and .... I think you get my point. The problem is elsewhere...

And doesn't SLEEP suspend the current thread? That may or may not be appropriate in his app, I can't tell from here :-)

>After replying I see that Sim is using VFP5 after all! I'm gonna stick with my recommendation to switching to SLEEP or the even slicker FindFirstChangeNotification() explained at http://www.news2news.com/vfp/?example=117&function=168
>
>Sim - I'm eager to hear what you discover.