Thanks guys, this is much more help than I expected to get over the weekend. You have NO idea how glad I am to learn about the WM_DELETE_WINDOW protocol...

As for the child exit, these are all really great examples. I was so focused on the likelihood of this requiring a complex solution that it didn't occur to me to manually define an exit code for the cases I care about within the second script and test after the system() call returns. That seems to be working just fine. Sometimes it's too easy to overlook the fundamentals - thanks for the reminder, blazar!

Rob - to answer your questions from your first post, the child does not need to provide any information back to the parent other than the exit code. Also, the intended behavior is for the parent to wait for the child to exit before doing anything else. So I *think* in this case system() will be sufficient. But least now I have some excellent examples to go on for the more complex cases.

Thanks again, everyone -
Mark