Yes, I see what you mean. That might be a good one to translate to C to see if it works there. I remember having to change to WSTRINGZ when %UNICODE was defined, but that's all I remember about it, and hadn't tried to retrieve any command line strings or use Command$.
In terms of the issue I was having, I'm now 100% convinced its not a problem in my code. Its been one bad long month.
