>Thank you for ALL your help and patience Ken. The problem was that Visual Studio requires the entire VFP patch set (available from owners area) as well as the Visual Studio service pack. The patch in particular that turned the tide was the VFP50a patch set. This was supposedly incorporated in Studio but -surprise - its not there.

Ah yes...this problem first showed up just after SP3 came out, had it myself. There was a thread about 6 months ago, where it was solved, with same results as you found. There are a couple lines missing in the setup32.stf, I recently posted this answering someone else. But I didn't have that funny error with missing # that you had, so thought yours was something different, otherwise I would have jumped in sooner...