>I'd like to get my splash screen to appear without the little blip I get when I set _screen.visible = .F. at the top of main.prg. Application.visible property won't work because the _screen has already been exposed by the time the app is created. I'm not sure about the event sequence when main is executed...

I am away from my computer with VFP on it. Putting SCREEN=OFF (check the syntax, it could be SET SCREEN OFF) in the config.fpw file should prevent the screen from displaying. This only works for VFP5 or higher.