I think the Shell statement of VB even makes use of the ShellExecute() api, so both calls should be of the same result. Only with the direct API call you may have to terminate your strings with a chr$(0), as the definition requires a NULL terminated string.
I forgot to mention that also the Shell() function has an optional argument to specify the show-mode of the application started.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...87(VS.60).aspx