Ed,
Looks like a fun problem to work on. I've only done scheduling stuff in the Operations Research and AI-Prolog classes I've had, never any real-world problems of the size you are working with.
>The COM Servers themselves aren't written in VFP; we're stateful, requiring us to maintain context between calls by multiple clients when run out-of-process, and there are some sections of code that need fast, reliable IPC and mutex. Plus, some of our deployment targets are going to require that they run free-threaded, and VFP can't do this. The object being instantiated is moderately complex, with several collections and lots of variants, so ample opportunity is being given to lose a few bytes here and there in the course of interacting with VFP's OLE stuff. To give you an idea of what we're doing: