Hmmm, I suspect I might be pointing out the obvious when I say that there's no reason to write the screen image to disk before displaying it?

Only if I want to implement a complete FTP and/or HTTP client in raw software.

The only way I was able to get the app written (i.e., the only way I could do it in a reasonable amount of time without re-inventing a whole shitload of wheels) was to call out to the Internet Explorer DLL and ask it to grab the file for me. And IE won't load the file into a memory string for me, it will only download the file to the hard disk. If there were an easy way that I could load it directly into memory instead of to disk, I would have done it that way for sure. If anyone can link to some pre-written VB code that can grab a file via HTTP directly into memory without touching the disk, then please do.

If you want to stop hogging the CPU, you'll have to stop busy-waiting on stuff -- blocking on message queues or semaphores or file handles or whatever will cause your process to yield

Which is an exceptionally large PITA in visual basic 6. The Internet Explorer DLL that I'm using is the one doing the blocking that I must wait upon. The only way around it would be to create another thread, and coding threads in VB6 is just downright arcane. Again, something I would have done if only it were easy and quick to do. But projects like EmpegFace don't get that kind of quality time outta me.

I suppose not if I minimized it, but this is called Empegface afterall.

True. But I made it a system tray app so that it could spend most of its life minimized and only display the face when you needed to see it for remote control.