Hi, Thanks for your reply! First of all; the reason I don't want to have the program itself as a service is simply that I fear memory leaks and other events that may a) Make the service eat all memory. b) Core, burn and die. Consequently, the second idea seems much more interesting. Sorry for being a newbie (unix is my preferable domain), but what are the minimum requirements for a Window app? Just a winmain() procedure, or is there something more to it (given that I do not want to handle any messages, draw anything, etc). All the program is going to do is quickly fetch some emails and store them in a database. I.e. a straightforward background job. Sincerely, Sverre Hjelm