The forum would have to be moderated to stop people moving idiotic unanswered questions there, but it doesn't have to be hard. For example, you could have an "ooh that's a tricky one" button on each post, and each user can only click it once. You then tally up the "votes" as it were, and when you get to a certain score (depending on user membership level) a copy gets linked to the hard questions forum.

I thought of trying to use the MSComm code. I don't think you need to wrap it in VB do you? I think you can use it direct from VC++. However I am not sure if doing so forces you to link to the multi-threaded library or not. Plus if you use ActiveX objects, doesn't your app have to be a Windows app, i.e. not a console app?