>Man, oh man do I feel stupid. There is some code in the init of the desktop form that sets _SCREEN.Visible = .T.. It's left over from an earlier incarnation of the app that manipulated this to do some other smoke and mirrors type stuff. Thanks for the wake up call, and sorry for wasting everybody's time.

No problem...I'm having a bad day myself, having to uninstall a vfp6 app and install an old vfp5 version, just to get things working...not exactly what I call progress <s>