David,

>I'm having a hell of a time trying to get VFP to print my money fields the way I want them.
>

I suggest you write a little UDF, specifically because of the parentheses. I found in VFP 3 that VFP messed up columns of numbers that used parentheses. It would basically do this to a column on numbers:

12345.67
  (1.95)
 (23.47)
 9876.57

This drove me nuts until I finally decided the design team had simply not thought of the possibility of properly stacking a column of numbers and leaving a space on the right for positives so things would line up. Having written the UDF some years ago, I've been using it ever since. Yours might go something like this (season to taste):

PROCEDURE myFormat
LPARAM TheNumber,ThePicture
LOCAL lcRetVal

lcRetVal = TRANS(ABS(TheNumber),ThePicture)
IF TheNumber > 0
  lcRetVal = " " + lcRetVal + " "
ELSE
  lcRetVal = "(" + lcRetVal + ")"
ENDIF
RETURN "$ " + lcRetVal

Example uses would be:

Input                        Output
====================         =================
MyFormat(100,"999,999.99")      $      100.00 
MyFormat(-20000,"999,999.99")   $ ( 20,000.00)
MyFormat(.59,"999,999.99")      $         .59
MyFormat(-998457,"999,999.99")  $ (998,457.00)

Hope this helps.