>I'm having trouble doing something pretty basic:
>
>I want to have a form with two buttons on it: Start and Stop
>
>When one pushes 'Start', a background process starts that performs a continuous loop, looking for files in a particular directory, and copying them to another if they exist. In order to stop this sentinel process, one would press 'stop'.
>
>However I write the code, the focus seems to remain with the background endless loop, and I can't get the 'stop' button to work.


Change the loop to be like this:

thisform.EndlesLoop = .f.
DO WHILE thisform.EndlesLoop
   .......
   DOEVENTS FORCE
ENDDO

In your Stop button:

thisform.EndlesLoop = .f.

(not tested)