FontCharSet is only relevant to the display font characater set, not to how the data is stored in tables. Two VERY different things, and unfortunately, two things that do not work well together in VFP if you want a language other than the Windows localized language.

IOW if I am running, for example, Hebrew Windows, I can set the codepage and store Hebrew data in a .dbf. I can also set the FontCharset for display.

But if I am running US Windows, I may be able to display Hebrew charactes, but they cannot be stored as only codepages native to the Windows version are supported. Check out Rick Strahl's article.

>>i am trying to enter russian characters into my table,
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>>i have given the command
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>>codepage=1250 in config.fpw
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>That's central european set, i.e. latin with šđčćžöüóúőpŁłéáű etc. For cyrillic, the codepage is 1251.
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>>and in my startup main program
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>>

>>set collate="RUSSIAN"
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>Don't. Collation should be set for certain indexes individually, where you need them - on names etc - not on numeric or date fields. Probably can't be done anyway. Indexing a non-character field on anything but machine sequence is, if not impossible, leading to errors.
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>>but i still get ???? instead of the russian characters
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>Get it where? You should be able to set the .FontCharSet for any control, including _screen. Mind you, this does not include form captions, as they are governed by the current machine's character set for non-unicode programs, which is set somewhere in the control panel, regional settings or some such, depending on your version of windows. If there's a mismatch there, you'll get question marks or all accented characters (because the cyrillic set is, in cp1251, all in the upper half, which maps to these accented things in other codepages).