Thanks for your input, the form idea is good...but.
what I was getting at is that date for instance should be a system wide setting, I cant think of system i have written or will write in the future that will have two forms with different date settings, if somebody can think of one that makes sense then i will concede.
The message to microsoft was more from a registry setting, if i am in Australia i would set date to british, it then is feasible to think that all my screens should get the setting from my default not something that is built into VFP that you cant seem to change. That's what was annoying me the most that it picked up some inbuilt settings from somewhere that couldn't be changed (not by tools options). the other thing is even if you set it to look at the control panel and create a private data session it does not respect those settings (this in my opinion is a 'BUG') it goes against any other packages that respect control panel setings, non consistency from Microsoft, I am not surprised however.