thank you very much rick ! that was fast :| now i have another problem, how do i prevent my files from being deleted by the self-extracting archive ? the sfx i created tries to delete a few files after extraction and successful run of the specified program, and i dont understand why. i guess it tries to delete every file after the batch's execution, but only manages to delete those which are not in use by another process. i though about killing the original sfx process with my batch file (launched program after extraction) but is there a simpler way to do this ?