John, it works on 98/ME/NT/XP with other application running at the same time. I never used a timer before but I did not find it to be that bad on CPU. So far, it never created a problem or conflict with other apps.

The test I send you was every 5 seconds just for testing; the live system retrieve the information from 1 to 6 times a minute, depending how often the user has to see the information.

The timer is just one way of avoiding doing a push from the server to the client. The real code retrieves the records from a SQL server every elapse time.

Sylvain