Unable to call external program/dll

[pipo]

Hoi,

I would like to call up another application from within Excel/VBA. The
simple use of 'Shell "prog"' does not work on one computer
(WinXP/Office Excel 2003(11)/VB6.3), but perfectly well on another
(Win2000/Excel2000(9)/VB6.0). The return value is always 0 on the WinXp
machine; no process is ever started there while I certainly have
permission to run that application from the command line.

This lead me to try ShellExecute by using a Declare statement. Same
problem: Always a 0 as return value. ShellExecute API claims a zero
means Out of memory. But.. It turns out I cannot call any external Dll.
Return value is always zero.

Butchering the Declare statement to include a bogus dll or function
name gives the same result. A silent zero return value. Never an error
53 (file not found) or 453 (function not found) as the Win2000 machine
pops up in such cases. It is as if external calls are disabled.. (can
it be disabled? is this a "security" fix in xp or office? how to turn
it off?)

Does anyone recognice these sympthoms? What would be the cause and how
can I fix it? Searching Google and a few VB forums didn't help me at
all. Everyone seems to use Declare and calling Dll functions for this
and that without ever mentioning any problems. I'm the only one?

 

[pipo]

Bah, bah!

After having searched all settings in Windows, Office, Excel, and
Visual Basic (and all of them at least three times each) I finally had
the bright idea to check what the firewall and anti-virus programs are
capable of at the "faulty" computer.

It was the virus scanner that blocked my excel macro.

So, just for the records (in case someone else would search for help on
this problem in the future):

I wanted to start another application from within an excel/vba macro.
The "Shell" command did not work. Using "ShellExecute" from shell32.dll
did not work. Actually it was not possible to call any external finction
in any dll. All this worked perfectly well on an older computer (with
older software) but not on a newer computer (with newer software).

Recent versions of Kaspersky's anti-virus scanner (and most likely
other virus scanners as well?) uses real-time vba macros monitoring. It
can block a command or abort a macro that tries to use shell commands,
windows api calls, delete files and directories, and so on, and so on.