>>Shouldn't you have a scatter memvar here?
>
>I copied the code from Walter's post -- there was no SCATTER at that position.

He mentioned this somewhere upstream:

Lets say you have an application object "Applic" and you use outdated VFP commands like SCATTER MEMVAR in your biz_classes superclass to deal with the entities in your application. what do you think would happen if you dared to have a new field "Applic" in some of your tables and this SCATTER MEMVAR is executed ?

Bang... your application crashes on the SCATTER MEMVAR, leaving the three finger salute.

And then this example was supposed to show how bad it can get - well, he forgot the main ingredient :).