With VFP 5.0 you won't need the Win32 functions to hide the screen as
you can do that with the CONFIG.FPW command.

I've found that a good way to do a splash screen is to design a self
contained bitmap and display it in the VFP main window. That way you
can at least see something happeing while VFP is loading. So there's
the main screen coming up, then the splash images loads into that
and when your app finally gets ready to load your startup form can hide
the VFP screen (if you're building SDI based applications) or clear it and
pop your forms ontop.