At work we are trying to add to an already existing program, it's a retail point-of-sale system. The main area of the program has a couple of toolbars, and their logo/help system in HTML in the middle. We've already written an interface using VB that acts as a web server, and interfaces with one of our other programs.
So lets say we wanted to display a store transfer page, I'd just link to http://localhost:1988/storetrans?date=02042005+trans=234

That would fetch the info from the DB, and generate a HTML page, and serve it to the program. It's rather nice.

What we would like to do though, is not have the user log in twice. Right now it's once to log onto the retail system, and then again on the HTML. Is there a way I could get from that program what user is currently logged in? There's not a way to talk to the program, and the company isn't interesting in helping us at all. Maybe I could get that info from where it stores it in RAM?

If anyone has any ideas that would be great.

Any reason you wrote a web server in VB?

If you were using apache or IIS you could easily track users through cookies and/or sessions in a server side scripting language.

That wouldn't help, I need the user name that is logged in on the program.

Anyone?

I don't know how they do it, but if you log onto Sony's Launchpad and then go to one of their sites, you'll be automatically loged in. However, I do know that their program pulls HTML code for Internet Explorer...or something.