Thanks Sergey. I just want to add to anyone who is reading this later, for example, that the empty class doesn't have the addproperty method. that threw me for a bit until i looked it up in the "what's new in vfp8.0" book. you have to use the addproperty function.

One thing I've noticed here, which i touched on in my message to cetin, is that this seems to be a lot more work to pass variables when all i would have to do is list them as public. in your opinion, why would this be worth it? what makes this better? the method in my example was listed as the "best" method (from kilofox) for returning multiple values from a function. now i think kilofox was dealing with vfp6.0. can vfp8 return multiple values from a function without having to go through this?

thanks,

Paul