I have a question... Let us say for a moment that I have a nice large program file that is an associated program, say 30k bytes large...definitely too large to be opened in RAM. Now, I select it and try to open it... would DCS be able to open the viewer program to handle it, or would a memory error occur? I know that a lot of *run from archive* utilities clone the run program into RAM, but I'm not sure if the DCS AP feature would.

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AP programs are never launched directly by DoorsCS. If you open one, it results in the viewer program being launched at the header-specified APStart label.

However, the wiki does state that APs are copied to RAM.

So then I would have to have the program opened from within the viewer only, so that I could simply return pointers to the data of it in archive. So, next question...

I can use ChkFindSym, and the resulting pointers to read data out of the file in a read-only way, right?

Yes, that's correct. You'll be given pointers into RAM or ROM that you can read directly (for RAM) or using bcalls (for ROM). It's an implementation detail, but there's also a header, a copy of the program's VAT entry, that you need to skip if you're accessing an archived variable.