>Is this overkill, or do most programmers actually do this with every CreateObject request? Or should I just pay attention to what I am doing and rely on my manual testing to make sure I did it correcty?

Not every... only those which go through a factory, which should be all of them :).

A factory object creates objects for you, does the checking and returns .null. if there's an error. The examples on how to write your own factory can be found, though the Fox Wiki mentions "abstract factory" - which is just a horseshoe on a frog, i.e. "abstract" in the factory was actually related to C++ as in "this factory doesn't need to know the names of available classes, only the names of concrete factories", whereas a concrete factory was the one capable of creating an object from a specific family, so they could be compiled separately, independently and whatnot... simply because in those days such limitations applied to compilers which didn't keep the names of everything lying around, so getting a class and library name from a table and just creating an object out of two such strings was out of the question.

Not so in VFP - you can do that, and it's often done.