Well, I was never able to get the PlaySound function to work exactly the way I wanted it to. Thanks for everyone's help and advice, but I implemented a work-around.

My solution was to cheap out. I set up the registry entries so that my application's sounds appear in the Control Panel and can be edited there. But under the hood, when my app makes one of those sounds, it simply reads those entries and physically plays the .wav directly from the file.

So, from an end-user perspective, it works the same way, I just couldn't tell PlaySound to play the event itself, I had to locate the file that the event points to and tell PlaySound to play the file.

I actually have the app working, and I've been using it regularly. I've just recently added features that might make it ready for public consumption. Does anyone want to test it for me and give me feeback?

Here's a description of the app:

I call it PageChecker. It's a system tray icon that reloads a web page over and over again at specified intervals. When the web page has new content, it blinks at you and plays a wav file.

For instance, I run two instances of PageChecker on my system, one to monitor my web-based email account, and another to monitor the Empeg BBS.

Why do I use it to check my mail? Because at work, I'm behind a firewall and can't check my mail using SMTP and POP3 protocols because they're blocked. So I have PageChecker log into my ISP's webmail interface with this tool.

PageChecker also has a built-in web browser (using the web browser DLL that comes with Internet Explorer), so I don't have to launch a copy of IE or Netscape if I want to quickly reply to one of the messages.

You could, theoretically, also use it to check news pages or weather pages (within certain restrictions). Or if there were an FTP site that you wanted to check for new files, I think you could even do that as well. I can remember days when I was awaiting certain game demos and I'd sit there mashing the "reload" button until the file appeared. This utility will essentially do that for you if you want.

I'm a little leery about publishing this app, though, because of its very nature. Its job is to hammer a web site with queries. Some site admins would frown upon that. I dunno how to resolve that...

If anyone wants to try out this app and give me feedback, let me know and I'll e-mail you the first version. After I get some feedback, I'll probably put it up on my home page for the public.

___________
Tony Fabris