you also need to check for rs.bof. If the recordset is empty (no rows returned) BOTH eof and bof will be true, and movefirst, movelast, movenext, moveprevious and move(bmk) will all return an error, sice there is no record to move to. Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power Eric Hoffer All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke

You still do not need to allocate a buffer, since all you need is a pointer to a single character. Hmmm! I should have noted that recv(server,...) was a typo, since that was a typo, then shutdown(server...) is also a typo. I looked up the functions used and here is what your code will do once the typos are fix: FIRST TIME TRU LOOP: 1) Read 1 byte from the socket and then ignore it. 2) START INFINITE LOOP { 3) Open a file. 4) While( there is a byte received OR a SOCKET_ERROR ) { 5) copy byte to file. // before checking if error occured 6) if( error ) break; } 7) Shut down socket so you can no longer send or receive and data. (This means recv(...) will now always return SOCKET_ERROR) 8) Close file. 9) } // END OF INFINITE LOOP AFTER FIRST LOOP: 1) START INFINITE LOOP { 2) Open file. 3) While( SOCKET_ERROR ) { // because of shutdown above 4) Write the last character received (during first loop). 5) Break out of loop (since it was a SOCKER_ERROR). } 6) Try to shut down again (cann't because it was already done). 7) Close file. 8) } // END OF INFINITE LOOP I do not think that was what you were trying to do, but that is what should be happening. There is also the fact that the INFINITE LOOP cann't be stoped properly (any other way if bad). INTP "The more help VB provides VB programmers, the more miserable your life as a C++ programmer becomes." Andrew W. Troelsen

Notepad just edits text files. Are you talking about opening and reading the file, or are you trying to the the contents of the Notepad window? Notepad doesn't put any locks on the files it opens, so use standard file methods to open and read it. Reading the Notepad window will be much more difficult to do in VB because now your trying to read the memory of another process, something that is "mostly" forbidden in Windows. RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome

What you should do is lookup "Named Pipes". This is in essence exactly what you want to do. Do a search on SS_Log on Codeproject and you'll find the SS_Log_Server article that does exactly that.

You're ignoring the length of received data (returned by recv()), you're not checking if all data is read in a single call to recv() and you're assuming that the data placed in buf by recv() is zero-terminated.