I too have tried this out (I copied an example in the Kixtart manual...) and indeed it just sits there. Well, something occurred to me a bit later.. the shell command is supposed to wait for execution to complete before returning control to the script. I haven't tried it yet, but try opening your program using the "run" command which does not wait... then maybe sleep it a couple seconds to give the app some time to load then try the sendkeys.