>My modal forms are fully modal so I don't have menus in them. I can't help much more with getting menus to work in a modal form.

so how do you cope with similar scenarios? ferinstance...

I'm in the 'cashbook'. I have a question on a credit note. I hop into the invoice form (hiding but not closing the cashbook because I'll be wanting to carry on where I left off as soon as I've sorted out my question) where I find that the problem relates to the original order so I now hop into the order form (leaving the invoice form similarly hidden but open) . Here I find that I now have to create a query for a bunch of related orders (or carry out some other function which is triggered from my system menu rather than the current form). etc etc

All of which was a piece of cake in FP DOS but feels like pulling teeth in VFP...

>
>As for scope of objects versus memvars, well, memvars come in three possible scopes, Public, Private, and Local. The scope of an object is from its creation to is destruction. An object can have more than one memvar reference to it and each reference will have a scope during which that reference is usefull. There is ALWAYS a reference to an object, when all references go away so does the object. The problem you are having is that you don't know what the default reference that VFP is creating is named. If you force the naming then you will know what the name is, as long as the name you force has the same scope as the object itself.

I think I've finally grasped that - but just how do you "force has the same scope as the object itself."?

I can see how you initialise the scope by using the syntax you've advised (do form blah name myname) but at what point does 'myname' disappear? If it automatically vanishes when the form is 'destroyed', no problem, but can anything cause it to go out of scope either prematurely or to remain in scope even when the form has been destroyed. If so, how do we control such behaviour?

>You can always work through the _screen.Forms() collection to get a reference to any form that exists. Although I prefer to use my own form manager to do this for me.

tried doing this in the debugger just to get a feel for what the 'collection' looks like. Not posseebull - Apparently. So how does one see inside the forms() collection?

and thanks for all the help so far

Harry