>>Actually, I have _screen.visible=.f., the form i'm referring to is a top level form - kind of an app launcher (there are several seperate sections of my application) The taskbar button doesn't even have the fox icon in it - its completely blank...have you heard of any win32 API calls I could make with the hwnd to suppress this? or anything?
>
>I've heard about that at DevCon. I don't think there is anything to do to avoid this empty task bar while the top level is loading.

after digging a little bit more in the developper guide, I found the solution on how to get rid of the main visual foxpro window, here is a brief description of what has to be done:

in the main.prg ( used to start the application ), I redefine some of the _SCREEN object porperties, like size and caption just before the 'DO FORM... statement

in the load event of the called form,
'application.visible = .f.' has to be added

the 'showwindow' property of the form has to be defined has top_level (2)

before returning back to the main.prg, you have to make sure the following statement is read:

'application.visible =.t.'