On windows, allow Apache service "to interact with the desktop"... in the services manager GUI Rgds Venkat ****************** Greetings! I was using popen and pclose on a previous version of PHP on Windows with an older version of Apache (2.x). ( I think it was 4.4.1 but will need to check as i am not sure). pclose(popen("start " . $exe . " " . $args, "r")) Where $exe is my path to the batch file and $args are the arguments for the batch file. The batch file, in turn calls other batch files on a shared folder on a different PC On Windows, it would open up the dos window and run commands there and exit and the PHP script that called the pclose would terminate loading on the users' browsers. Now, with PHP 4.4.2, the pclose and popen send the tasks to the background and the dos window does not show up! As a result, killing the dos process is not possible (i get access denied in windows...) and the users cannot see the dos window when it runs. I would like the php script to send the commands to a dos window, and the php script to finish executing. I tried passthru, system, exec and proc_open... and none of them work. None of them bring up the dos window. Please help! Regards Venkat