Donny,

>Please don't take offense to my posting, I was not trying to refute anything you had posted. My intent was to comment on the quality of the VFP documentation and how it may be adding to the confusion on this issue.

I didn't take any at all, sorry if it sounded like I did. The documentation does slowly get better, but it's far from perfect that's for sure.

>It's that 'subtle but distinct difference' that is actually a fairly major paradigm shift for programmers that have had, up to now, direct control of everything. It's equivalent to the philosophical difference between 'when your dead its over' and 'your not truly gone until no one remembers you'. I still don't have my brain fully warped er wraped around the OOP approach so I can empathize with the wish for a way to directly distroy an object. From an architectural point of view (based mainly on what I've read in this thread) I can see why things are the way they are, but some design time tool that could backtrack those references would be nice.

I like your philosophical statement in there. It does sum up what's going on fairly well. This isn't something that beginning developers are going to hit when they first start. Except for the inevitable questions about "Why doesn't my form close when I click the X button.. and why is it disabled now?" When they first start to play with inter object references. It's easy to get that answer here online, not so easy from the docs. I covered these things in detail in the ProsTalk OOP book to help people move from FP2.x to objects.