In technical programming I often have one application call a session of another. For example a general purpose language might submit a command to the OS to run a specialty program in batch mode, telling it to read one text file and write its results into another.
When I do this in WinXP, I can let the OS tell the calling program when the called program has completed and closed.
But when I use the same programs to do this in Win2000, the OS returns control to the calling program as soon as the called program has started, and I have to make the calling program keep checking for the existence of the results file so it waits before proceeding.
What’s the deal with this? What more sophisticated understanding of these environments would let me write these things in a less OS-specific way?
I’m not a professional programmer, by the way. I’m just a scientist using computers.