The hardest thing for me to give up when moving from Fox DOS to VFP was not having results remain on the screen through the execution of several commands. Since there was no status bar in Fox DOS, for the most part all output went to the screen and remained there until scrolling pushed it out of view. Being a creature of habit I decided to create an output window and have TALK go there. It works great and I have the best of both worlds now. To make it happen I have the following code in a startup program.

define window outpwind ;
from 15.500,53.500 to 36.000,88.000 ;
name OutPWnd ;
font 'courier new',8 style 'B' ;
title 'Output Window' ;
color W+/BG ;
close float grow minimize zoom
show window outpwind
set talk window outpwind

The ouput window just hangs around under my command window on the right side of the screen. Other types of output, such as, ?,??, list, display, etc. are left justified (for the most part) on the VFP screen and the status bar gives me a continuous view of the current alias, its DBF(), current record number and total records.
Enough precursor, here's the issue:

During a session, if I never allow a different form to become the active form by using DO FORM ..., any output going to the output window scroll from the bottom line up and remains in the window even when totally or partially covered by a browse window, dialog or other such item. If I do allow another form to become active when that form is destroyed the output window loses it's persistency. Any text on the output window is gone when the window is obscured by another window. I don't want to set the AlwaysOnTop property of the output window even though this would prevent the noted behavior.
A kludge that I have developed seems to work but I can't understand why. I run the following code:

if wvisible('outpwind')
activate window outpwind
list file like *.*
for a = 1 to 20
?
endfor
activate window "command"
activate screen
endif
return

Once I do that the output window behavior returns to normal.
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance for any responses.