>My challenge is not only to make the program 3-tier with SQL Server as back end (which is my BIGGEST GOAL) but to make customers accept it. You see, I am sure you have seen it, with a monolithic program user is "spoiled" with easy (and very fast) access to all tables. For example, I have a Part table in my application where user can get to 10,000 or 20,000 parts in a browser (grid) form instantly. Then they can scroll, search, whatever. When you change the program to 3-tier with SQL Server as a back end, user has to specify something about the parts they are looking for: location, make, and so on. Some customers will be so angry, I may have to go to the witness protection program <g>.

I hear ya. Before even starting with such a conversion, I would get access to a computer running SQL Server or download SQL 2005 express http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/
and see if you can transfer that data out of SQL and into a grid at a speed that would be acceptable to your users. You might be surprised how fast SQL can serve the data then transfer it to the client. You could even do the old VFP trick of loading all the parts when the users starts the app and then storing it locally... then just any newly add parts when they open the browse screen.

For me, the users gave up the huge scrollable grid when I gave them an incremental search where they could type in a partial string match then hit search to pull back the matching data. Then they could keep typing in more of the string to narrow their search. They always have the choice of typing in no partial match then hitting search to bring back all of the data... they know this will take 1-5 seconds versus a split second. I'm just glad that I never implemented this incremental search in the pure VFP app, then I would have been stuck. :-)