>Using the VFP help designer (as poor as it may be) in windows help mode (vs help table mode), what do you have to do to get the Table of Contents to show if you are NOT on an object that has a help id assosciated with it? Currently it brings up the first topic in the list.

Depending on how your help titles are organized, you may want to use your form's caption as the default help item, so somewhere at the end of the form( class)'s .Activate, you can

set topic to this.caption

...and if your form's caption exists as a help topic, that'll be it. This is unsafe, though, if you change the caption of your form, or whatever. You may do

set topic to "a real topic title for this particular form"

but then you'd have to do it for each form; the first approach allows you to do it at the class level, but then your captions and topic should be in sync, else you'd end up on the first topic again.