Thank you, Julius, for your reply.  The timeout mentioned is a bit of a red herring in that I used a timeout in my testing to avoid having the attempted call out from the Cache routine hang and having to kill the process manually.  Of course I understand about timeouts and match your 40 years experience in development, user interfaces, instrument interfaces, consulting and coding.

My experience show that needing to depend on USERS to "do the right thing" .. e.g look at a log file or even read an email is NOT a realistic expectation and far from reliable.  However, each to their own.

The main topic, which has NOT been addressed although "hinted at" from Dmitriy, is how to produce a user-interactive window on the server's desktop for which the content and trigger for appearing comes from a Cache routine running in the background.. i.e. jobbed.

I'm going to try creating a Task Scheduler entry (using a "schtask" call which will, in turn, call an executable which produces the interactive window) from within the Cache routine and have the task scheduler generate the popup.  Seems to work in principle ... we'll see if it works in practice.  ANY other suggestions are very welcome.

I'd appreciate it if replies centered on how to produce the interactive window, if possible.... but all other discussions are welcome.

Cheers!   Doug