>I have similar situations in the past. Jim's responses are interesting an I will study them for future referance. I was pointed as you were to the bring to front button as a "not too good" work around. I have been seting up my pages that way ever since. It has worked well for me all though it is not the preferred method. I just start at the top of the form and work my way down and repeat the process every time an object is added to the middle. I couldn't believe it actually changed the order of the records in the scx file and find the ZOrder explination much more plausable.

It's quite true, scx record order of same-level objects is the instantiation order. It's kind of a subset of a container Zorder, but based on time rather than "stacking" order...