Heh, that Forte app I was talking about? Plenty of people thought it would be "easy" to replace parts of it... at least two projects failed, I succeeded replacing part of it with a .NET program (the data entry part). Every new manager thinks about replacing it, and then realize it's insane.

Now we're looking at buying a proven software package - even though its price will be in the millions of dollars, it's better than trying to build it ourselves (I estimated three million dollars for an in-house project, and a big chance of failure, most certainly not satisfying user's expectations).