Human, I'm not looking for alternative ways to achieve the same result (such as using VirtualAllocEx and WriteProcessMemory), I was only curious to know why stack execution was failing.

By the way, DEP on my machine (I'm running Windows 2003) is enabled only for "essential programs and services" and I'm sure that notepad.exe (that is the process on which I tried stack execution) *is not* considered an essential program or service

So I would say that DEP is not the cause of the failure.

yaa