>It's my understanding that, inside any object's method code, RELEASE THIS releases the object unconditionally. Hence, all my base classes have a Release method does does nothing but RELEASE THIS.

I don't think so - if you have left over references in other areas of
your code that object will stick around. Doing RELEASE THIS is also
not safe, because you're telling the object to release itself before
state is cleaned up.

I firmly believe that you should never release your object internally,
at least not through the language. Rather I belive in having Release
methods that make sure that when the object goes away all hanging
refs get cleaned up properly.

>I'm sure you're aware of the reason for the behavior you describe. Memory management can be difficult in OOP, because of all the little objects floating around. In general, though, you don't have to concern yourself with memory leaks in VFP the way you'd have to in C++, e.g.

Hanging references are definitely a problem in VFP and not all of them
come from actual assignments <s>... This stuff is very difficult
to track down for sure.

+++ Rick ---