>Access97 really does not have OOP. I was wanting to start out with Visual Modeler to get a good handle on the design aspect of it.

In the same way, Access2000 and VB are not supporting full OOP methodology. IMHO, if you want to keep your data in an MDB database, stick with ACCESS or VB. Using VFP with MDB Database woulnd't help your application scalable to higher dimension long term and development is even more painful although challenging. If you wanted to upsize with Server-based databases, then that's the time you try considering other tools such as VFP, Delphi, PowerBuilder, etc. MS is pushing MSDE over JET to make application scalable without code changes to SQL Server.