Roger,
You're reaching the limits of my programming knowledge with your question, but here are my thoughts.
It sounds to me like the "browser" that runs inside the AC II tab has certain security limitations that the normal IE browser, running as a standalone, doesn't. For instance, when you run normal IE, there are all sorts of security options that you can set (from Tools... Internet Options etc), which will enable or disable certain things like running scripts. These options don't seem to be available when the IE browser is running inside AC, and maybe running an exe from a script isn't allowed, for security reason. This would explain why your viewer program runs from a normal browser but not inside AC. Maybe there is a way to rewrite the button script that would work, but my knowledge of JS is minimal, and if there really is a security limitation on running exe's, maybe no way to do this.
As for PHP, you can do all sorts of things with PHP, but PHP runs on a web server. When you write a PHP program, the output is a webpage with all the html; the PHP interpreter itself runs on the webserver that serves up the webpage. So you could conceivably rewrite your VB viewer in PHP, but you would have to have everything it needs sitting on a webserver. If you wanted to do it locally, you would have to set up a webserver on your computer, add PHP capability to it and then port your VB program to PHP.
Very interested to hear what others think.
Michael
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Michael Jacobson, MD
New York, NY
