A lot of your reply seems to be couched in terms of 'You have a long way to go before you're ready for an application of this magnitude, Sonny'. Well, I did say I haven't done a lot with it in the past, however I'm fairly sure I understand how the Coffee Monitor application should work. With my background, I damn well *should* understand it. It's not that I don't understand it, simply that I can't get it running using the simple step-by-step instructions. The reason I tried it at all was to make sure I could get an ActiveX application running on my machine. The very last thing I expected in that exercise was to discover that Microsoft's instructions do not match the behaviour of VB, i.e. that I can't set a reference to a .vbp file as they instruct me to do. That doesn't fill me with confidence about approaching any of the 'official' documentation I might find!