then just a way to enter the "userid:password" parameter is pretty much all that's needed there (...) Done.

Yes, but it's a tad more complicated than that. Since the program isn't written in C, I'd need to either translate your base64 code to VB, or find some existing art on doing base64 in VB. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a built in windows function to do the encoding for me, I'll have a look when I get a chance. Anyway, I'd also need to update the user interface to add the fields for the user name and password, and deal with whether I want to store it as plaintext or store it encoded for security reasons. Then there's parsing it all back from my ini file.

There's a nagging feeling in the back of my mind telling me that doing username:password@empeg-address worked in the past, though. Which makes me wonder why it's not working now. I could be wrong.

Oh wait, I know why it worked in the past. Before I was using the internet explorer function, so it was essentially acting like a web browser. To get rid of the blocking call to the IE DLL so that I could do my own idle loop, I switched to direct winsock calls instead. Okay.