Hi there, thank you very much for your help! You've led me to the right path. The LoadLibrary etc. is alright, the problem was the external resource DLL in conjunction with a custom control. I have to register the window class of the control with the WNDCLASS-structure. One element of this is the hInst, which most of the controls (Grid, BitmapViewer etc.) fill with AfxGetInstanceHandle(), which is okay in most cases. But: here I needed AfxGetResourceHandle(), as I have to register the control with the resource DLL!!! I still don't know why it worked with NT, but... Greetings, Martin :-)))))

Hi, I've got it!!! When using an external DLL, you have to register the window class for THAT DLL! So you have to set the hInst of the WNDCLASS-structure via AfxGetResourceHandle() instead of AfxGetInstanceHandle() as it is done most of the time... Happy greetings, Martin

Thanks, Alfadhly, but that's not the point, all the controls have other IDs. In the meantime I got another hint: The dialogs don't load when I put the ressources into an EXTERNAL DLL (as it is the case in this project)! You can do this with a minimal test app and you will get the same problems! Is there a way to tell the application, that it has to run with such an external DLL AND custom controls? Did I miss something important to do? Every other dialog works just fine, only the dialogs with custom controls in it refuse to load... Martin