>Hmm OK - not quite as bad as I thought. The situation is this. I am creaing a complex package solution for about 40 clients who users of an old mini package (there are other users out there who are not clients .....yet), so programming for one client is not an option at this point - they must use my VFP solution. This one guy wants to use thin client so his employees can't play games or load unapproved stuff on their computers. Cost is also a factor (they're cheap *G*).He has about 40 stores in 8-10 locations over a Frame Relay set-up. We are trying to convince him there are better solutions (eg NT) so the more arguments the better. Thanks for your answer. It will help.

There are infinitely easier and better solutions to control of the desktop than thin client; the Microsoft Zero Administration Kit, in conjunction with user profiles, can limit what can be put on the desktop, and what the user cna do as far as accessing applications or adding things to a system. NT is not a requirement for use of ZAK; you should probably go out to Microsoft's web site and investigate it further.

In this case, i truly doubt that thin client is going to be a means of saving money. Even with a thin client application, the user needs something to act as a terminal, and the cost of a Windows terminal is not really less than the cost of a Windows PC. In reality, it's probably cheaper to buy a PC to run as a terminal (last week at Staples, they had the HP Pavilion 6355 (Celeron 333, 64MB, 6GB HD, CD ROM, sound, speakers, modem, in fact everything but a monitor) for about $800, and you can get a much lower end machine than that!) And if he does go with a PC as the terminal, without something like ZAK, you're still faced with the problems of controlling the desktop.

Since the client's concern is desktop management and not centralized control of the one application, you might do well to steer him in another direction than thin client implementation.

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>>The biggest problem with VFP apps under Citrix is speed; screen update time is poor, and refreshing a single control requires refreshing the entire active window because of how VFP controls and windows work. It does work, but whether the speed of screen update is acceptable is going to depend heavily onb how busy your forms are and the speed of your connection.
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>>Thin client is worth it in many cases; an n-tier approach to development, with a front-end that uses standard Windows controls is probably the best course of action. VB with the right choice of widgets is probably a better front-end choice than VFP; VB with non-compliant widgets is just as bad as VFP. InterDev has worked well for me in the experiments I've done. I have yet to actually put an InterDev-based front-end solution in place in a production environment for a client, although I have a couple of pilot projects going that seem to be working well.
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