Robert,
I get the hint that you open all of your tables in a startup prg and access them in your forms.
You may want to look into using Private Data Sessions (a property on the form sheet). I avoid table relationships and prefer to code SQL instead. But for simple programming the relationships do work.

The advantages of private datasessions is that you can load the forms several times without the record pointers conflicting with each other.
The disadvantage is a slightly slower form load, since table opens are one of fox's slowest operations.

For example:
1) Set a form with Private Data Session enabled

2) in the form LOAD event:

USE DATA\TABLE1 SHARED IN 0 ORDER TAG1
USE DATA\TABLE2 SHARED IN 0 ORDER TAG1
=CursorSetProp('Buffering',3,'TABLE1')
=CursorSetProp('Buffering',3,'TABLE2')
SELECT TABLE1
SET RELATION TO FIELD1 INTO TABLE2


Of course you can also do all of this in the DE as well.