>I use the form designer, and don't create it programmatically, so, how would I implement your advice in this situation?

I allways forget that one can use scx's. To me a form is a class, and I instantiate with CREATEOBJECT and NEWOBJECT, so I have to turn visibility on myself anyway.
I have all my forms as VCX and work in general without any designer.

What you can try (never done this)

DO FORM XYZ NOSHOW

and in the forms INIT event as very last line until RETURN

THIS.VISIBLE = .T.

I guess a form handler that could do something similar to

DO FORM XYZ TO loSomeVar NOSHOW
loSomeVar.VISIBLE = .T.

might be to complex. You understand, this needs some handling of an array or something the like for the forms open and more stuff.