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>Sure this will speed loading individuals forms (maybe at the expense of overall app performance, maybe not.) My main question is whether the users can crash or slow your application to a crawl by openining many instances of a forms, or many forms simulataneously. I could not cause this problem in the small sample application I've built -- but wonder whether I might run into it in the grownup version.
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>It does seem like no one on this thread has run into it. A lot of people use private datasessions, and as long as they are aware of certain limitations (let the de open and close the tables etc. ) there seems to be no problem. In short -- were these crashes simply caused by a programmer who did not know how to handle private data sessions? Or if you have users who tend never to close a screen, are you asking for trouble by building a completely modeless application with all private data sessions.
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>The thing is -- it is no problem to build into the base class of our application forms a thing to let us limit both the number of instances users can load of any one form, and the total number of forms they have open at any one time.
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>The question is -- is this neccesary? Can we just let user open as many instances of a form as there heart desires or open as many forms at they same time as they wish? With private data sessions, we won't run into record pointer probles and thus won't need a ton of special arrays to keep track of things.
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>But the particular users do tend to never close a screen. Do we need to limit the number they can have open at the same time to protect them from themselves, or is this not a problem?

I have no limitations like this and have never had a problem. Most users will not open the same form more than twice, three times at the most. It gets too confusing otherwise. As a option, if a user tries to open a form that is open, just set focus to it. Many Windows application work this way.