Fantastic Rich!! many thanks - that did the trick.
Is there a NOWAIT feature i can throw in there somewhere.??

I did follow up on Naomi's suggestions and read vfp help and some detailed feature articles for hours last night but could not make any headway in the modify/do form category. Creating the form and getting it to appear is no problem - it's the filling up the form with data that i have reached a deadend. I would need a complete sample code in this area and work backwards to figure it out since i have no examples to study. If you can provide a link to a functioning code that i could use - that would be greatly apprecated

All that said however - i am extremely grateful to you and Naomi for getting my editbox up and working outside my vfp page - that's a tremendous help. thanks so much

k