Philip-

I use the DEs alot. Personally, I'm grateful to not have to write all my own USE, etc routines (I've written them enough at this point in my life < s >).

IMO, if you overload a DE then yes it will be slow. Perhaps what hand-coding does is force one to be more efficient in their file use. But you can do the same thing with DEs. AFAIK, there isn't any performance hit to using the DE to open tables over the equivelent code. But, I've never benchmarked this. What I do gain is a visual documentation of the data structure for a form (a picture is worth a thousand words, right?) which, again IMHO, is invaluable for maintaince and debugging.

Just my .02 worth.

BTW, I use a mixture of form objects and classes, but when I use a form class I generally still use the DE, just define programmatically.

>Is there a downside to not using the DE?