Perhaps the static method Bitmap.FromHBitmap(IntPtr ptr) will help you? Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Who is Jewish, the Trivia Game! Judah Himango

Look into SetWindowsHookEx It's frustrating being a genius and living the life of a moron!!!

I tired that but this message filter does not seem to work on child dialogs (froms).

I did exactly that. it works fine for the main application form but when ever there is a model dialog popup the filter does not work on that window.....any idea why

At first I want to apologize for the late answer. In my previous post I didn't suggest that you create another thread, but rather that for the opened modal dialog a new UI thread is created. Today, I checked this theory and it's false. The number of threads of an application stays the same when you open a modal dialog. So for me there is no obvious reason why the message filter didn't get notice of the messages for the modal dialog. Maybe you open a new thread with this specific problem, as surely another CP is able to provide a solution :) www.troschuetz.de

PS> what I need is a blocking write with a timeout so that if no read is performed for a specified time the thread unlocks.

Thanks a lot!! I know that the number of clients will be very limited usually max 2, so I think there is not much to worry about....

It is a good thought indeed but for my case the user on both XP and 2000 are newly created standard users. They have been created from the User Management console in both OS.

thanks I was able to resolve that issue...now I am facing a new issue..CreateProcessWithLogonW call is taking too much time on a WinXP machine, but work fine of a Win2000...any ideas why?

BOOL SetNamedPipeHandleState( HANDLE hNamedPipe, // handle to named pipe LPDWORD lpMode, // pointer to new pipe mode LPDWORD lpMaxCollectionCount, // pointer to maximum collection count LPDWORD lpCollectDataTimeout // pointer to time-out value );

And if you want Targa, we wrote that for paintlib ages ago, but they seem to be slow in version releases nowadays. The mailing list also seems to have died. A shame, because it was very good, it still does a lot of stuff GDI+ does not do natively ( although as I wrote a lot of the filter classes especially ( also not in, if you want 3x3 spatial, gamma, colour, contrast, email me )), although I don't expect it will be too hard to write my own in GDI+. Christian #include "std_disclaimer.h" People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made. The things that come to those who wait are usually the things left by those who got there first.