well like i said a while loop isn't going to work... i'm planning on releasing the script and it'll just be bad... plus i don't know how big the zip files are nor would i have any idea on how to calculate how long it would take to extract, even if i did know the proc speed and everything, theres still way to many things that factor in to be able to do it reasonably... I did checkout zip.dll, but it won't even try to extract a file that doesn't end in .zip which is just crazy, it should be checking the acutal file header. So it looks like i'm just going to have to write a dll to do it, since that will actually halt the script.