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>In summary, using public variables just to share data among form methods is not convenient. However, a few public variables in the main program may be justified. It should be possible to have a single public variable, an "application object", to store different kinds of data for your application; all kinds of data can be stored in different properties of the application object. (An application object might store user name and user level, a list of open forms, or any other information which you need once for the entire application.)

I'm not much of a theorist, and maybe we're saying the same thing differently, but it seems to me that public variables should be used only to share information between applications. If I want to create a variable which is scoped to the entire application, it would be declared Private in the main program.