Winwaitactive and Focus

[boji]

I need to wait for a child window on a old win program to complete a query and populate a field before I can continue a script, and I have not found a stable way to achieve this outside of bouncing focus, ie initiate work for old prog, then WinActivate("Program Manager",""), then returning focus to the old prog with WinWaitActive(), let it churn, next step.

Is there any better way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Also has anyone advice on ways to catch errors as events rather than line by line IF blahbah() = @error Then hunkydory()?

Is it a dumb idea to run satellite prog that looks for errors or timeouts in the workflow of base prog and sends ini changes to base prog accordingly? Sorry I'm new to programming; what methodologies to the big boys use for failsafeing? Any book to recommend?

Cheers