>BTW, on the speed issue John mentioned, I once heard a story that a development team rewrote a VB middle-tier object that did lots of string manipulation in VFP and saw a 100-fold improvement in performance.


A recent showdown at news.devx.com in the Offramp group showed VFP's speed advantage in string manipulation to be largely myth. It's true that handling large strings in memory in VFP is much faster than doing the same thing in VB, but as a VBer over there pointed out, that's just not the way you do it in VB. There were several VB/VFP challenges set forth in which programmers from each side put together routine to perform the same task: VB killed VFP in File I/O, string manipulation was very close.