Hi David,

Thanks for your further explantion. So in order for a GUI object to appear in a form, it must be created in the context of the form, I can't just pass an already fabricated GUI object, a button for example, to a running form and ask the form to "contain" it, and hence show it. I guess that is all about the event loop as you said...

>David,
>
>In order for an object to be part of the event loop, meaning a user can interact with it (see it, click it, type into it), it must be a contained object of a form. Which means that you have to thisform.AddObject() the object to the form. Non-form objects that are instantiated with CreateObject() are never part of the event loop, and as Sergey said you can't make an already existing object part of another object.
>
>>Is it possible to put an existing button object on the surface of an existing form? e.g. as in the code below, is there a way to make the button 'ob' show up in the form 'of'?
>>
>>ob = createobject('commandbutton')
>>of = createobject('form')
>>of.show(1)