To my delight, I discovered the java-idl bridge which allows me to call IDL from a java code. This is a holy grail I've been looking for for a long time. I was disappointed to find that appearently debugging is not possible. I played with the JIDLCommandLine demo (...\IDL63\examples\doc\bridges\java\JIDLCommanLine.java), hoping to find that I could stop and step through my IDL code, but this doesn't seem to work. Maybe there's a good reason that this is not supported, but this is functionality I would really like to have. I've played with screen scraping a spawned IDL process, and this would be a much cleaner route to go. Jeremy