david,
i apologize for the lack of info, my lack of familiarity with the framework is obvious. the application framework i am referring to is the one shipped with vfp6. anyhow after too much time looking for the answer, i did find it and it was simple, it should have been obvious. it was a matter of going to the class library genereated by framework ie myproject_app, class app_application, propeties, other, changing lstartupform to .F..
thanks
frank