>I understand that the native data environment is transmorgrified to a CM data environment at runtime.

It does, but you have way less control over the cursors, you are using VFP relations in the DE. This is descibed in the CM cursor objects at design time and it works much better. I must admit, I am not totally sure what you were saying in your question but as I understand it, you have a set of related cursors. All cursors except the primary cursor are opened in modal data child forms. You have grids each of the child forms. Correct?