>If you have a tip for encryption and authentication programming ... ?

Under fox2x? Fox2x supports com,bin files. I'd create ASM files to handle it or plb files. In any case going that way requires you to know either C or Assembly. If you do, it works very well for things like that (ie: I've created libraries to check hardware, local,network drives, Novel interaction etc in the past and was very disppointed seeing VFP dropped the support for assembly - and from mouth of one of the top persons in team was told it won't get back into product because only few ppl do such things). My other alternative was to use external exes (written in C and Prolog).
Cetin