Launch web page from my application
Please read the docs for ShellExecute closely. To really bulletproof your code, they recommend initializing COM. See the docs here, and look for the part that says "COM should be initialized as shown here". The short answer is to do this (if you haven't already init'd COM):
CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED | COINIT_DISABLE_OLE1DDE)