many windows functions seem to take a "HANDLE" as argument, instead of useful numbers. What is a HANDLE and what''s the best tutorial about this? Thanks.

A HANDLE is a value that the operating system gives you. You''re not supposed to want to think about what''s inside it, so they disguise it as an opaque type.

In practice, a HANDLE is either a pointer into OS memory or a index into an OS table. About the only difference between the two is that, in general, you''re more likely to be able to share a pointer style HANDLE with another process than you are an index style HANDLE.