>The application is installed in a brand new directory created by the setup.exe install routine. Administrator and all users have full rights to the directory. The desktop icon which launches the application is set to start in the application folder. If I copy the foxuser.dbf into to folder everything works fine but if the foxuser.dbf is not preexisting, VFP does not create it as it should (and does with my other applications).

Is there a config.fpw with resource=off compiled into the exe maybe?

I know I had the opposite problem, the foxuser being always created (and we didn't want to use it at all), and it didn't stop until we added such a config.fpw file into the project.