>I'm guessing that the development path must be referenced somehow in the .EXE, or while building the .EXE. When the path is the same, VFP assumes that it is the same class and uses the existing instance. When the path is different, VFP assumes that the classes are different and creates a new instance. ??

MS will tell you that what you are experiancing is "By Design". You must ensure that all classlibs and classes have unique names. Otherwise
VFP will try to use its internal class cache and it "Aways" seems to get to it first.