The utility I created is called "proxy.exe" but you can rename any EXE file to anything you like. What's different about the proxy utility is that it "knows" what it is called. If you rename it to "epro.exe" it know that its name is now "epro.exe" when you run it.

They way the proxy utility works is simple, it looks at its current name, strips off the ".exe" extension and looks for a BAT file in the same directory with the same name and runs it without displaying a DOS box. So if you rename proxy.exe to epro.exe it will look for and try to run a file called epro.bat in the same directory.

How does this help you? You can't pass parameters to EXE files in Flash MX so you need some way to identify different files you want to open like PDF files etc. The easy solution is to create a BAT file for each PDF file you want to open and do fscommand("exec", "pdf1.bat"), but then you get the ugly DOS box. The proxy utility gets around that.

The pdf1.bat file might look something like this...

==============
start pdf1.pdf
==============

Now your job is to create a BAT file for each PDF file and then make a copy of proxy.exe for each BAT file that has the same name as the bat file pdf1.exe, pdf1.bat, pdf2.exe, pdf2.bat and do fscommand("exec", "pdf1.exe") instead of calling the BAT file directly. The renamed copy of proxy.exe runs the correct BAT file so the PDF gets opened and no DOS box!