I wanna firstly thank you for your reply. Actually that .exe file is not notepad.exe . The whole thing belongs to a web-based program that does some kind of online simulation. The program used to be on Apache server and worked fine. Now I am trying to trasfer it on Windows server. But I came across the problem of processing the cgi files in Windows. That exe file is acutally a simulation exe file which reads some data from another txt file and do some calculation and make another output txt file. So the whole thing would be run on the server side, not client side. The user (client) "submit" some data in a html page which will run the cgi file. The cgi file put the submitted data in a txt file, and then calls the exe file and redirect to another html page which would contain the results of simulation. I have problem running that exe file under windows server! if I run the cgi file in the commandline (perl myfile.cgi), everthing works OK and that output is made. However, from IE , it halts in spite of the fact that the related "process" is called( as I checked in the "processor" tab.)