Hi, Neil,

To me it sounds like Fox is deciding what alignment to give that column before you have populated the grid with your recordsource. I can remember similar happening to me in VFP 3.0, but not in more recent versions.

Do you set the grid's recordsource in your form's init? If so, the grid's init will have already run and it may have initially picked up another cursor or file as it's recordsource. It will use any cursor or file in the currently selected area when the grid is initialised. I find this quite annoying sometimes. Use debug to find out what table is current when the grid is initialised.

I played around a bit trying to recreate your problem but couldn't but I could get it to give me strange column widths. I generally put a 'select 0' as the last command in my form's load to stop it doing this, but this isn't foolproof as code buried deep in parent classes of controls loaded between the forms load and the grid's initialisation
can still produce grids with unexpected properties if they select an alias.

Hope this helps.