A little off topic, but I thought I'd butt in.
kedaman - you seem to be the guy to talk to when it comes to timing things, so can I pose the following problem...
I have a FORTRAN DLL and a FORTRAM COM object that implement the same functions, and I started a VB test application to try and test the function runtime differences. It works fine except that the time taken to execute a loop of DLL / COM functions seems, weirdly, dependent on how many of the DLL / COM functions I call in my test loop. Can you think of a reason why this might be so? Also, I was sort of expecting one implementation to consistently outperform the other, but, apparently, sometimes the DLL is faster and sometimes the COM object is faster... again - any ideas?