>Burt,
>I did not actually create a vfp9 report. I was running existing reports created with VFP 7. I wanted to see how they would look as VFP 9 reports - result: full of *****. The question I have deals with why the VFP 7 EXE just seems to ignore the Set Reportbehavior command while the development envir reports an error.

Could you have an Error Handler (ON ERROR or .Error method) that's supressing/ignoring the actual error?