Naomi,

I had the same problem and was able to solve it...

this really *is* completely idiotic. I've spent another couple of hours on it now, just to see what happens where. When I do the same steps from within the class I can not access loIcon.Handle at any point, but in the debugger *always* have it at hand, and also am able to query it. The handle does not get destroyed neither. I have now added added two properties that temporarily hold the handle. with those the method runs through and properly creates the bitmaps (So You're getting close to having Your bitmaps). It must have something to do with VFP's internal memory management. Running the same methods from an external prg works like a charm.