>thankyou very much, I don't think I want to go DDE it'd take me too many steps back, I think I'm going to give VFPCOM a chance, it's got an hour of my time from now

If you mean a vfp COM bridge, that should be possible, but if you mean COM event raising/listening with VFPCOM.dll I doubt that will work - but if you does, post your results pls.

>and if that seems problematic I'm going to go for the shared table. the performace cost is not an issue in this case, so I think that may be the best answer.

sounds reasonable. Regarding your earlier mail vfp7: If it gets "political", I'ld argue for vfp9 and windows event listening <bg>.

regards

thomas