Skomolafe, it seems to me that pending a solution being developed by CA you could work around it by writing something inventive yourself. I presume if you're thinking of using VB then you're hoping to get at ACF2 through a Windows platform. You could, I think, write a program on the mainframe side that listens for incoming commands on a designated port; this part isn't hard, in fact it's pretty easy in REXX (I learned how just recently) but I think you can do it also in some flavor of C. On the Windows side you write a client that issues the commands and receives the responses. You'd have to invent protocols for communication, but they're all at the application level; the transmission of plain text, and the necessary ASCII/EBCDIC translation, is all done by routines already available.