>You are probably right. But I wonder having used SYS(2015) all these years to get unique cursor names, why I have not run into this before -- especially since file names beginning with a mumeral became legal in DOS 5 ( or 6? ).

Sys(2015) returns a alphanumeric string starting with an underscore, which is legal. All aliases, fields, objects, and properties must begin with a letter or underscore.