>Regarding "favorite pattern" the original developer is unavailable, and the company maintaining it has limited knowledge of VFP.

Ooops - in that case I'd make SURE to ask them if you should eval the app twice or perhaps 1.5 times:
once the last version of the original dev and again the last maintained by a limited knowledge guy.

Had to revive a large app once and was fuming about it: some parts quite wellwritten, others lousy -
the maintainer had really twisted a design not bad at all (even if not my cup of tea, but workable
if you stay inside the mechanisms planned and offered) into a monster. Realized that as I SourceSafed
the versions over 4 years (maintainer hadn't used SSafe and had left a huge pool of open calls,
some of them stemming from years back and marked "unsolvable". Guess what: they weren't <g>.

Might make a diference in estimating how to "fix" if possible, if you see the originally planned design.

my 0.20 EUR (been there..)

thomas