Bonnie,

>> It seems that my code ends up being all over the place and it's hard to find things. <<

If I can stray away from the technical for a moment, let me just say, "Hang in there." I developed a complete class library in VFP 3, which seemed so great in conception, but seeemed like nothing but a collection of mistakes when I was finished. But I used it anyway and resolved not to go rewriting until I'd soaked up more wisdom. Now, two years later, I've crafted for myself a complete framework based on ideas I'm comfortable with, and not a few of them due to stumbling down blind alleys at first.

>> It's obvious to me that I'm doing something wrong, cuz it's supposed to be easier, not harder, but I think I'm
missing something important. <<

Well, again, I think most on this forum (who are honest <s>) will admit that OOP thinking has some alien aspects to it. If you keep plugging, the light bulb does go on.

>> .... Now, with OOP, we're back to putting stuff in a gazillion different places, and this is why I
think I may be misunderstanding some basic concepts and I may not be doing things correctly. It seems like a step backward to me. <<

My experience exactly, but it does not have to be. You can subclass and still call out to other sources, which is what I do for WHEN and VALID. IOW, all of my controls call "oDD.When(this,thisform)" and "oDD.Valid(this,thisform)". This keeps all of my framework WHEN and VALID logic in one place, while having it accessed from all controls.

It's really cool if you keep at it. Hope this helps.