Rather than polling, you can call SetWindowsHookEx() and check for VK_CAPITAL. "Love people and use things, not love things and use people." - Unknown "To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne

Visual Studio 2005 offers a better development environment than VC++ 6.0 and a vastly superior C++ compiler. The MFC support takes a while to get used to and is in some ways worse than with VC++ 6.0. Visual Studio 2008 builds on this, but is still the proverbial bastard step-child for C++ support. One other issue is that if you ship your MFC using DLLs, the SxS (side-by-side) compilation in VS 2005 and 2008 makes deployment a real headache. On top of that, the lastest MFC release DLLs are massively bloated due to the addition of the BCG libraries (this was a very idiotic decision in a long line of stupid decisions by the MFC "architects".) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

For the "others" that allow chat, remember, they're doing that differently - through their servers. However, you want to run a server behind your modem/router - that requires incoming connections, which need to get to the computer listening for them. I googled "HughesNet port forwarding" last night and most hits stated that a static IP was needed. I'm not sure why, except for the fact that dynamic IP can change making hard for remote nodes to connect, but it should still work the same if the other end knows what IP you have at the moment.  Regardless, there were a lot of hits saying the static IP was required. As far as configuring the hardware - that "should" be trivial.  Generally there's an HTTP interface to do the configuration, but I couldn't find any specifics on the HughesNet modems.  Google will help there for sure though. I went through this when I first started communication programming - I'm a programmer, not an IT guy, dammit! You'll know your network really well when you get it working ;) Good luck - you can do it! :) Mark Mark Salsbery Microsoft MVP - Visual C++ :java: