abhijit bhopale wrote: search for structure packing You may want to do that yourself ;P By default.... struct MyStruct { char a;//1 byte int b;//4 byte int c;//4 byte }; ...is not a 9 byte structure.  It's more like struct MyStruct { char a;//1 byte + 3 bytes padding int b;//4 byte int c;//4 byte }; Size is 12 bytes. Mark Mark Salsbery Microsoft MVP - Visual C++ :java:

Giving it a little more thought, I'm thinking I could just yank the the logged-in user's name from the registry when said user browses to the page and check that against the relevant active directory groups. My real concern is the potential security hole that is running through my head at the moment: Is it possible that someone else could write code that impersonated an administrator if they figured out where I stashed that info in the registry? Say Bob User was a local admin on Server1 but not Server2. If I had my encrypted account stored on Server1 and Bob found it, could he write an app just like mine that he could execute from Server1, impersonating the encrypted credentials, and use it to perform local admin operations on Server2?

Right. I implemented a message box that informs them that other dependent services stopped (and the names of those services), just so they know. The people who will be using this will know what services they want running, and it's simple enough for them to restart dependent services themselves if they so desire. They can handle doing that thinking on their own. Interestingly enough, I've found that (in at least some cases) when you start a service that depends on another service that is stopped, it will start that other service first. The TCP/IP Print Server will start the Print Spooler if it's stopped when you pass it the "StartService" method, for example.

I got it. This Microsoft article walks you through making your web app impersonate any user account you wish: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3BEN-US%3BQ306158[^] As long as the account your app impersonates has local admin rights on the server you are accessing you have full WMI power from your app. Very cool.

Well, I might as well continue answering my own questions. A bit of searching and I found this problem with WMI queries. Essentially, that report tells me that even though I ran my query looking for local users it still queries my entire domain to find them. My very large network isn't exactly standardized software-wise, so I assume the servers that this script hangs on don't have the proper hotfixes to handle my query. "EXIT FOR" is of course the equivalent to "break" that I was looking for, but I'm still curious about a condition that would break off the loop after a certain amount of inactivity. The query in my code runs server-side, so my end is indeed inactive while it queries endlessly. Another more useful tip would be one that explains how to improve my query. My problem is...essentially...solved, but not nearly to my satisfaction. Any help would still be much appreciated.