Hi Andy,

if VDEN.exe is in no way programmable,
not to be seen anything like it in extras references,
then indeed for controlling it you may have to rely
on another program like Word and to use sendkeys.

Notoriously unreliable.

Close all other programs.
Disconnect from anything.

Activating any application is easy: shell(),
but could be done manually as well.

If, hopefully, Sendkeys is working at all,
then you wouldn't need the clipboard,
as you could send all letters to an inputbox or so
in VDEN.exe. If this fails only partly, you might try
to use the clipboard. For that, you need a reference
to the MSForms-Library, which, alas, might not to be
found in extras references, but is added automatically,
as soon as you have a userform somewhere in your VBA-code.
Just any userform, you don't have to use it.
Then you can create a dataobject and use methods like
putinclipboard.

Good Luck

Greetings from Bavaria, Germany

Helmut Weber, MVP
"red.sys" & chr(64) & "t-online.de"
Word XP, Win 98
http://word.mvps.org/