Good morning everyone, I have a little program which I have run with VB from years back that opens a Shell and runs a program and waits for it to finish before passing control back to the calling program. I have been trying to convert this code to Delphi without success. I am sure it is not rocket science but I have a little difficulty making the leap to the concept of pointers... Anyway here is the code. I was wondering if anyone could give me a couple of ideas on how to convert this. All the Type declarations are already in Windows.pas. Public Sub Shell(PathName As String, Optional WindowStyle As Long) Dim proc As PROCESS_INFORMATION Dim Start As STARTUPINFO Dim ret As Long ' Initialize the STARTUPINFO structure: With Start .cb = Len(Start) If Not IsMissing(WindowStyle) Then .dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW .wShowWindow = WindowStyle End If End With ' Start the shelled application: ret& = CreateProcessA(0&, PathName, 0&, 0&, 1&, _ HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS, 0&, 0&, Start, proc) ' Wait for the shelled application to finish: ret& = WaitForSingleObject(proc.hProcess, INFINITE) ret& = CloseHandle(proc.hProcess) End Sub I have this so far but it gives me 'Winoldap - This program has performed an illegal operation...' I am guessing it is something to do with pointers or some such. procedure RunShell(FileName : string; WindowStyle : Integer); var proc : PROCESS_INFORMATION; Start : STARTUPINFO; begin // Initialize the STARTUPINFO structure: with Start do begin cb := SizeOf(Start); dwFlags := STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW; wShowWindow := WindowStyle; end; // Start the shelled application: CreateProcessA(nil, PChar(FileName), nil, nil, True, HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS, nil, nil, Start, proc); // Wait for the shelled application to finish: WaitForSingleObject(proc.hProcess, INFINITE); CloseHandle(proc.hProcess); end; Thanks in advance Steve --------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Zealand Delphi Users group - Delphi List - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz To UnSub, send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body of "unsubscribe delphi" Web Archive at: http://www.mail-archive.com/delphi%40delphi.org.nz/