I did some playing around with the shell() command in VB. I figured what the heck - the worst it could do is reformat my drive and I would have to load Linux

I tried X=Shell("MyProg.bat hello there",1)
MyProg.bat is:
---------
echo off
echo %1% %2%
pause
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and to my amazement IT WORKED

It opened a cmd window which said:
Hello There
press any key to continue ....
So the documentation is a little misleading. In the statement X=Shell("command",window_style), "comand" means anything you would type on the command line including parameters. So one is able to pass it the values from encoders or DROs very easily.
My wizard is 99% done.

Thanks for looking into this - I appreciate your efforts.