Mike,

No I don't open the tables myself. I'm a strong adherent to letting VFP do all the work it possibly can do for me. I let it takes care of the mundane, grunt work of opening/closing tables and free myself to write more useful, creative code.

I won't comment on what Ed does or doesn't want to do, you'd have to ask him.

>Right, thats what I'm saying, maybe he doesn't want to do all those uses. Or is a USE AGAIN different than a USE? Never thought about it.
>
>BTW, is opening all the tables in the first DS common practice? I don't know.