>In addition to Bruce's comments, the practical upshot to VFP and the cursor is that you can't rely on the right cursor being displayed automatically in almost any circumstances. You should almost always manually change the cursor before beginning an operation that may take more than a second or two.

Speaking as one who is still using code like _screen.mousepointer in vfp6, I'm not so sure that what you're saying is true any longer, in vfp6 and all future versions....

Suppose users (as many here do) have the hourglass set to something else for Wait time. You still want to use that, if possible, and the default behavior in vfp6 is to pick that up, is it not? So, you don't want to over-ride that, if possible, IMO.