hmmm, works great on mine (winxp 1.8 Ghz, 256MB ram)

>>>Very nice indeed! But it worked so fast and took so many cycles that ESC didn't respond.
>>>Had to kill the process :)
>>
>>Interesting - I didn't have that problem. Perhaps because I am still using a 300 MHz machine?
>>
>>I assume using inkey() within the loop will be safer in cases like these?
>
>Maybe. A fast box would need some kind of wait state to take a breather and read the keyboard every once in a while :) Maybe also with the Sleep API.