I have tried to reproduce your problem without the benefit of the clipper executable. In my example I have created a bat file with the content:

notepad.exe

I then execute the bat file with the nShowCmd parameter set to 0

DECLARE INTEGER ShellExecute   IN shell32.dll;
		INTEGER hWnd,;
		STRING    @ lpOperation         ,; 
		STRING    @ lpFile,;
		STRING    @ lpParas,;
		STRING    @ lpDir,;
		INTEGER   nShowCmd
RetVal = ShellExecute(0,'open','C:\tmp\np.bat', '','',0)

This brings up Notepad without the DOS window.

HTH

Alan