>AFAIK you can remove members in code, only not in the design time.

Not quite. Though I haven't tried it in the last (couple of) version(s), I remember that the objects themselves may vanish, but the references to them remain. They just become null. You can still see them in the debugger. The type() and vartype() and pemstatus(,,5) may all indicate existence.

It's an old problem that I somehow instinctively avoid, so I wouldn't know how it works now in VFP9, but last time I had it, it behaved quite weird.