The horrors of working with executables on windows

I run an executable called Test.exe via exec which in turns runs Outlook.

I am able to run the Test.exe fine but I get the error:

Rejected Safe Mode action : Microsoft Office Outlook. in the windows event viewer.

If I run Test.exe myself via DOS it works fine and no errors. So its something to do with how PHP is running th开发者_如何学JAVAis exectuable. I've enabled apache to run as an admin account but the same thing happens.

What else should I be doing so that Apache can run the executable without any problems?

It works from the command line but not from the Apache process. Not surprisingly because Apache probably runs as a service, with a system account (Non-Desktop interactive).

If you reconfigure the service to run as a user with the right to logon locally and mark the service to be allowed 'Interaction with Desktop', I expect you could do this.

However, I'm at a total loss why anyone, at all, would want to start Outlook from a webserver application....

Sehe is right (but for some reason I cannot comment to his post, whatever...). Usually, you should access MS Office facilities via external code using specific OLE interfaces. You never use CreateProcess to start Outlook or Word from your program, it would be pointless because how can you control it after launching it?

I suggest you to check if you really need this, and if there's a more clean way to do it. You can try to create an external C#/VB.NET executable that performs all the automation you may need to do with Microsoft Outlook, indeed.

What is the actual scenario?

And, I don't like to correct people but if I don't, someone else will in the future and it'll be annoying. Don't say "via DOS" when you use a prompt under Windows. :D

i too am perplexed by would anyone would want to do this.

If you REALLY wanted to do this i guess you could run it as "start test.exe" or write a batch file that would run it. basically anything that would cause a different process to be the one actually launching the app.