David...

I was concerned that a timer would affect performance, especially when I'm doing some serious querying that's grabbing a lot of system resources. Either the queries would be slowed down by the timer, or the timer would be stuttering because of the lack of resources that VFP will devote to it vs. the query. In either event, it would be better to simply tell the hardware that this is a flashing component than to repeatedly tell it to flash.

Am I incorrect in this assumption about performance?

Scott

>Scott,
>
>A timer going off every 500 milliseconds isn't going to adversely affect your performance. The tmr.Timer() event can either toggle the .Visible property of the current shape or alter it's FillColor.
>
>> I can't just use a timer, unfortunately. I'm attempting to create, in essence, an animated thermometer bar using shapes (circles, specifically) to represent the landmarks in the therm's process. So, this thermbar will:
>>
>>1) begin with 10 (or 20 or whatever) small red circles
>>2) fill items with green as that step is completed
>>3) show the current step as a flashing yellow
>>
>> Since this thermbar will only be updated periodically, I can't spare the clock cycles to update it twice every second or so. This is why I'm looking for a property that can be set or manipulated to emulate blinking.
>>
>> Worst case, I'll make the current step a static yellow, but a blinking yellow would be much more dynamic and meaningful: it would clearly indicate that the system is doing something, not, as Alan Cooper says, "going stupid". :)