>>>unfortunately, my form already met those criteria so it won't solve my problem. The reference to the _screen.activeform does the trick and I haven't got round to figuring out where the form goes out of scope.
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>
>>
>>Harry,
>>
>>How are you addressing the form and from where? Obviously, the form has not gone out of scope or it wouldn't be there. Your reference to the fomr may have gone out of scope, and to fix that it would be helpfuul to know the exact code you are using to refer to the form when it doesn't work (also very impotant to know where that code is in the system).
>
>Greetings Jim and welcome to the year 2000
>
>Have finally got back to working for a living. Dived in at this problem and found a new twist which, hopefully, will be easier to track down. Its got to be something basic and probably trivial.
>
>I run a form (called 'ORDHEADS').
>
>'_SCREEN.ACTIVEFORM.NAME' returns 'ORDHEADS' as we expect.
>
>but TYPE('ORDHEADS') returns 'U' instead of 'O' even while the form is staring back at me from the screen!
>
>The file name is 'ORDHEADS.SCX'. The form name property is 'ORDHEADS'. (as indeed is recognised by SCREEN.ACTIVEFORM.NAME) and WONTOP() also reports 'ORDHEADS'. But, just to confuse the issue TYPE(WONTOP()) also reports 'U' !!
>
>So how and why is the type reporting it as an undefined variable? All my other forms return the expected 'O' but I can't for the life of me see the difference in the way I'm treating the forms.
>
>Any ideas?
>
>Thanks
>

Harry,
You probably have some kind of "dangling" object reference in your form somewhere. The form can't go away until it can release all the objects contained in it. Does the "X" in the upper right corner of that form gray out? The form tried to close, but couldn't because of the object reference. David Frankenbach has a utility called OBJREF, I think, that can help with these kinds of problems.
>Harry