Thanks for responding...

About an hour after I sent the post, I remembered a string of about five characters from the registry key, so I went to a machine that worked properly and searched the registry for that key, wrote it down, then keyed it in manually to the computer that didn't work...and that solved it.

I used to think that was a problem on machines where you had VFP, then installed Office, then discovered that you lost your OCX controls. But in this case, it was a brand new laptop that had Office installed...I installed VFP (full install), and got the same 'license not found' message.

The 1st time this happened to me (March of '97), I was on the phone with MS tech support for three days before we got it resolved. I went through 4 tech support reps until I talked to someone who realized it wasn't 'user installation error.'

Kevin