megatron, so i should be able to use something like GetWindowTextLength with the ShellExecute return as an argument, right? But I'm running my test program line by line, and ShellExecute returns a value like 33 or 42, and passing that (which *is* the hwnd of the window resulting from ShellExecute, right? i'll feel so stupid if it's not) to GetWindowTextLength returns a 0, which shouldn't happen. what's wrong?