I really dont want to seem like I'm just hating on all your codebank posts and I dont want to discourage you from posting things in here, but... there are already a few threads in here that show how to do this - just do a search in the codebank before posting something here as there is no point duplicating things really. I just searched for "hotkey" and found this thread which has a nice managed .NET class that wraps up the functionality of the APIs you mentioned: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=542976

PS using Ctrl+A as a system wide hotkey is a bad idea as loads of programs use that for selecting all text. I'm sure you were only using it as an example though.