>Hi Rick
>
>I turned off the animation and removed the read events. I want this as a static mask in front of the .screen or current form. It's awfully close. I added a DOEVENTS after running your code. That made the form appear fully formed rather than as a ghostly apparition. The form also stays centered and in front.
>
>My hope was to show the progress bar through the transparent window. Then most of the progress bar's native ugliness would be hidden and replaced with something much more attractive. It almost works. I'm thinking the issue is to make rectform really topmost in the windows zorder or at least to make vfp one zorder back from it.
>
>Any ideas on that?
>
>Thanks


If you can get the HWND of the progress bar window you want it to be placed in front of, you can use the SetWindowPos() function to manually place it ahead in the ZOrder of a given window. You may also be able to read the exact location of sub-windows within to get the literal rectangle of the progress bar portion, and if so you can position your window exactly, rather than closely, to its correct location (based on variable user border widths, and so on).