Although not initially intended for real time monitoring and control systems, Windows NT is becoming increasingly important for monitoring and control applications in industrial automation, environmental monitoring, and multi-parameter patient monitoring systems. When such systems fail, recovery is required in a second or event less. "High availability" solutions developed for information technology systems are not applicable because (1) they require several minutes to start up and (2) recover only state data written to disks. Our technology, utilizes COM and OPC (OLE for Process Control), allows a standby computer to take over for a failed active computer in less than 1 second, and to resume operation with a complete knowledge of the state of the process at the time of the failure.