Hi Randy,

>What is the performance cost of issuing a DECLARE statement?

This depends heavily on how much of the API information is cached and loaded by VFP and Windows. If Windows has to locate the DLL by searching the path and the Systems directory, loading it, etc. it can take some time. I've measured this once with a particulary slow DECLARE command that took more than a second to execute. But typically it's really fast, much like a LOCAL statement.

Christof