> VFP determines the order to fire the Init methods(and other event processing) by the ZORDER property. This is the property is only affected by "Bring to Front" and "Send to Back" options in the designers. For the Init event, you are only assured that contained objects will fire their Init events before their containers (from inside to outside in container heirarchy). Although ZORDER controls the order of instantiation among objects that are at the same level in the containership heirarchy, it is not safe to rely on this order, it is too easy to disturb. Jim Booth's solutions are preferable to relying on this feature of VFP.

I fully agree about the philosophy, but I'm not sure how Zorder() could control instantiation order generally, when objects are added to screen with all having same default Zorder of 0 at design...it must either be tab order or order of object-adding that controls instantiation order (of same-level objects)...