thanks everyone for your help! i've solved it b/c of everyone's help. the problem was that the shortcut icon on the desktop was pointing to the network address for the exe, not the c drive. therefore, when i ran it in the vfp8.0 window, it would be utilizing the c:\tasks folder (which is where the exe and everything is stored). when i ran it from the desktop, the shortcut pointed to (\\hppav\tasks), which is the same folder on the same computer but it has to go through and drill down the network addresses (ie the server name is \\hppav).

thanks again!

paul