How to control other programs from visual basic

The problem is that i have to run two applications simulaneously (e.g excel and messenger) from a vb application and when these applications run they should be displayed in the way i want . Such as there is a vb form and i want these two programs to be running and displaying these program windows on the form vertically or horizontally. I 've tried a lot and succeeded only in running the programs using vb filing mechanism however how to align the running programs into vb form is not known. i think this is a case of API .So if any one can solve this problem ,please e-mail me at:
[email protected]

Did you try OLE/COM Automation? The VB interfaces to this will be a lot easier than trying to do that thru API.