>I am interested to hear from forum members how important (or not) you think it is to be able to offer 64 bit applications vs. 32 bit currently (regardless of language used). Do you feel that being able to offer 64 bit exes is important or not really an issue in the field of general business applications?

The only use case I can think of at this time is if your app can make good use of more than 2GB RAM. Server-side is relatively common with DB servers etc. Client-side they're still not common, I see others here have given a few examples. In the future we might see client-side smart agents, speech recognition/natural language processing, immersive UI, augmented reality etc.

One major advantage of a 64-bit OS and a computer with a lot of RAM is that any apps that run on it (32- or 64-bit) can benefit from a greatly increased disk cache. For example, suppose you have a VFP or other 32-bit app that's regularly accessing over 2GB of data. A 32-bit version of Windows will have a hard time juggling that much data and probably have to page to disk. But if you run the same use case on a 64-bit machine with 16GB RAM, probably the entire app+data will live in RAM and never page to disk.