>One annoying aside to this technique is that I can't seem to get the VFP components to honour SCREEN = OFF in the config.fpw, so the screen flashes on (annoyingly) until the first line of code (_SCREEN.VISIBLE = .F.) is hit.
>*
>Try to include config.fpw into your project (under "Text files") and then compile it into EXE

Thank you Marat. That did the trick.