Robert,
Thanks for your input on this subject  I was working on that problem for
awhile.
I've had several problems with the way VB declares DLL functions in the
past, especially with functions where the paramater may be of a unknown data
type.
I'm not sure if your familiar with VB, if so, I have a couple of questions
to ask of you since your the only one that replied to my LoadBitmap(Blah,
Whatever Blah) API  function problem....
VB seems to follow a set of rules that determines whether-or-not what data
type can be passed to functions, even if the function can accept a universal
value... C on the other hand can accept the data type, or a pointer (start
address _was that an old C64/128 term?_) to the data sent to the function.
In C, type checking doesn't seem to work perfectly if the parameter is a
pointer to the data (cause it's impossible...), and VB's perfectionism is
far too perfect to accept a 'universal' data type that a specific function
requires, this is where ByValue and ByRef takes toll in VB.
Since VB doesn't support 'true' function overloading, and the function has
to be declared in a specific way... how would you declare a function to
accept parameters that could be sent in a 'unknown' format? Should the
function be declared with several aliases?  Since I don't have access to the
source of the original DLL's, I need to know of a way to call a function
_SAFELY_ in different formats...
Any suggestions would be helpful...
BTW, I've already tried the use of _As Any_ in the function declarations, it
seems to work in VB4, but not VB5.  (bugg?)
John

sorry for cross posting that last message
i forgot to mention I've also tried declaring the functions with variant,
but vb seems to think that a variant is a definite
type...
the manual says that when calling dll functions with paramaters that could
be of an unknown data type to use AsAny as the type, but it just doesn't
seem to work the same in VB5...
i'm just wondering if it would be better to declare the same function under
different aliases with different paramaters for each alias... maybe that
would get me around the invalid parameter error?

    Yes. You should write each declare statement for each different
parameters, you can give them the more friendly name for each of them. You
can also only use only one declare statement , but when you call them add
the byval before some parameter.
    Hope this help and good luck!