>I'm sure you are right - everytime I run that ascpect of the application I my breath in case it chokes.
>
>However, I am not aware of any other memory management that I should be doing explicitly, so I would tend to expect FoxPro to take care of these issues, and if it doesn't then something is not behaving as advertised. There is a 3rd party MailSlot OCX from MH Software involved - it is _very_ busy at the point of these breakdowns - but it appears to continue functioning normally despite the UI being totally bogged down. Do OCXs have a sensitivity to shrinking memory resources ?
>
Gerry,

It depends on the OCX. Memory problems in VFP are usually related to some driver or another misbehaving, very often a printer or video driver. A misbehaving OCX could also tromp outside its memory area.

These errors cannot always be layed at the door of the application that discovers them (in this case VFP). VFP may simply be trying to access memory that windows said it has to find that some other program has already written to that memory. Your very large character string variable may have just stressed memory enough to discover something worng way out there in the addressing. By shortening the length of the string you may, or may not, have simply masked the memory probem until something else stressed memory enough to show it again.