[Lazarus] Windows DDE

[Daithi Haxton]

I have finally convinced my boss to have a look at Lazarus and start  
migrating our applications away from MFC ... but ....
We are Windows only, currently shipping Win7. I'm using Lazarus 1.0.10  
with the bundled FPC - relatively recent. Our applications control and  
communicate with various industrial devices via Dynamic Data Exchange  
(DDE), using Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange Management Library  
(DDEML). Delphi in all incarnations has had DDE controls - they're  
pretty much just simple WinAPI calls, so I figured I could port them  
rather painlessly.
A week and a half later I'm sending this message - hope someone can  
help.
The basic problem seems to be in passing a string to a function in  
Windows called DdeCreateStringHandle. It's already got a def in the  
win32 tree in Free Pascal - basically this:
function DdeCreateStringHandle(Inst: DWORD; psz: PChar;  CodePage:  
Integer): HSZ; stdcall;
It doesn't seem to matter how I call it, it always registers a null  
string. I call it like this:
ServiceHSz:= DdeCreateStringHandle(Inst, StringName, CP_WINANSI);
where StringName is a const PChar and Inst is a handle returned from  
the DDEInitialize function (which I know is valid by monitoring with  
other tools). This is basically identical to the VCL from Delphi 7 and  
prior - it works find there but not with FreePascal. I'm compiling  
with Delphi mode on and get no compilation errors.

DDE works on shared memory very much like the clipboard. I'm wondering  
if there's something amiss in that regard, but am at my wits end.

Any ideas are appreciated!
Thanks,
Dave H.