Houston,

I think the light bulb finally went on.

Is this how it works? When you add jobs to the COM/EXE, it returns almost immediately because it isn't really doing anything except adding the job to the array. Yes, it kicks off the timer but the 2 lines:

This.tmrDoTheWork.Interval = 100
This.tmrDoTheWork.Enabled = .T.

do not cause any delay because that's just the way timers work, i.e. they get kicked off and work in the background.

So we submit the job, leave the timer to do the crunching and immediately return to the calling process.

That's got to be right. Please tell me that's right. If it is, that's SLICK!

Assuming that is right, could I have the timer set the value of a property of the COM/EXE object, to False when it starts the job and True when it finishes, then I could check the value of that property in the calling process to determine if it is finished? Something like that maybe?

Thanks,
John