David:

The dataenvironment will open tables in the order they were added to the DE--if you use the opentables method. This can cause problems when you, for example, set the filter propery in one cursor to compare to another table field but that table opens later in the process.

I finally gave up struggling against this, and changed my thinking to assume nothing about order of tables opening or which is selected (as Edward suggests) with one exception...I do definately set the DE's initialselectedalias property.

If you must care, then I suggest that you set autoopentables to false, and handle opening the tables yourself. The downside of this approach is that the DE isn't helping as much as it can :-).

HTH

>> You cannot rely your application flow on the internal opening of tables. If you want to work with particular work area, then you should issue explicitly:
>Select MyTable
>
>yes, i understand but what i cannot figure out is why this intro form automatically opens the 'Admin!Correspondence' table when i can't find an explicit open anywhere. somewhere, when VFP starts, it must be selecting work area 1 by default. when i click on page2 it accesses 'Admin!Assignments' as it should but when i go back to page one it reverts back to 'Admin!Correspondence'. i can't see where there is any code in any init or click event that is causing this to happen.