There are a lot of good suggestions here, I think you will just need to look at your options and pick what suits you the best. Wanting compatability as well as small executables with few dependencies is every prgrammers dream, but you may need to strike a balance somewhere. Most languages today fall loosely into two catagories: Compiled and Interpreted. A compiled binary is source code which has been reduced to a set of instructions for use of a particular processor. These tend to be smaller and faster but because they contain instructions unique to a processors instruction set these tend to be the least portable. Interpreted languages are just that...interpreted. This means they require some form of middleware to transform the source into machine specifc operations. Since you are looking for an executable you are going to want a compiled language so that narrows it down. I see the suggestions include VB,C(++),Delphi. VB of course will require some .dll's in order to run but if you intend to use a GUI it may be well worth your while to looking into it and it will also resolve NT/98 kernel compatabilty issues for you(as long as your .dlls are all included). C or C++ will produce small code and is extremely flexible and powerful and although the binaries will not be cross platform the code should be fairly easy to port if you write standard code. However, C is known for giving coders rope to hang themselves so you may want to be sure you arent taking on more problems than you need and you may have to add extra code for differences in the 98 and NT API. I can't honetsly say much about Delphi because I have no experience with it, but I do know it would also be very portable although the compilers and reference material for Delphi may be a bit more obscure than for the other languages. As far as reverse engineering .dlls and such, without resorting to commercial products (which there are, if you google for them) I suggest you look into a disassembler and the GNU binutils which will let you dump information and symbols from object files.

-Maestr0

http://sources.redhat.com/binutils/d...nfo/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler