>So, would such an installation be considered a "Hack"...

Personally, I wouldn't consider it such.

Oh, by the way, I forgot: The basics of VFP may work, but you may need a separate installation (on each machine) for such things as CHM Help support (which, I suppose, will probably already work on XP, but not on Windows 95 or 98), for ActiveX controls, and such.

> or is there a protocol for such an installation?

Not that I know of. Just copy the required DLLs.

>Why did you end up with EXE's all over the place? That's exactly what I want to avoid.

Oh, well, that was something very specific for our needs. The users wanted to have "frozen" copies of the data, as it was one month ago, two months ago, etc., just in case they needed to check something. So we created copies of everything, marked most tables as R/O, and included the relevant version of the executable.

You see, if some change is done, it is sometimes difficult to keep all the information about how the data was before the change.

But for the "main" database, of course, a single EXE is enough.

Actually, we keep the last 30 versions of the EXE on the server, and have a loader program that automatically loads the latest version, or (depending on the parameters passed), allows the user to load an older version, in case the programmer - usually me - does some royal screw-up with the latest version.

The advantages of this system are:

It is possible to update the executable on the server, without having to kick out all the users first. If the latest version is called MyGreatApp_0100.exe, simply copy the newest version with the name MyGreatApp_0101.exe.

Users can load previous versions in case there is a severe problem with the latest version. This usually makes it unnecessary to ring up the poor programmer (namely me), for emergency repairs on weekends, for instance. (This doesn't always work, since some essential changes are related to the database structure.)

HTH,

Hilmar.

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)