Hoi,

I would like to call up another application from within Excel/VBA. The simple use of 'Shell "prog"' does not work on one computer (WinXP/Office Excel 2003(11)/VB6.3), but perfectly well on another (Win2000/Excel2000(9)/VB6.0). The return value is always 0 on the WinXp machine; no process is ever started there while I certainly have permission to run that application from the command line.

This lead me to try ShellExecute by using a Declare statement. Same problem: Always a 0 as return value. ShellExecute API claims a zero means Out of memory. But.. It turns out I cannot call any external Dll. Return value is always zero.

Butchering the Declare statement to include a bogus dll or function name gives the same result. A silent zero return value. Never an error 53 (file not found) or 453 (function not found) as the Win2000 machine pops up in such cases. It is as if external calls are disabled.. (can it be disabled? is this a "security" fix in xp or office? how to turn it off?)

Does anyone recognice these sympthoms? What would be the cause and how can I fix it? Searching Google and a few VB forums didn't help me at all. Everyone seems to use Declare and calling Dll functions for this and that without ever mentioning any problems. I'm the only one?