Windows2000 console control

[Ralph Bruno]

My application calls an a java app (FOP, which converts xml into pdf)
, that consequently opens a console to display it's progress.
I want to hide the console, but also capture the output for parsing. 
However, I also need to know when the Java app has finished so that I
can then open or print the resulting acrobat.
And finally, this all has to work as a gui app.

I first tried win32process.CreateProcess, which according to the docs
has a 'CREATE_NO_WINDOW' setting to hide the console, but this gave me
an 'Attribute Error' whenever I ran it.
It did give me a handle to the process, but it  didn't allow me any
way of at getting at the console output. Putting a pipe command in the
actual Java command line was also unsuccessful as the Java command
treated it as another argument and failed to execute.

I've tried win32pipe, but this doesn't seem to allow me to get the
process handle, although I can get at the console output.


Is there a neat way of combining the two, or is a completely different
approach needed?

Thanks in advance