Charles,

>... this sound like a DDE situation (or what used to be called that?).

Hmmmm. DDE might work if you can use the "asynchronous UDF" feature of DDEExecute() to fire up your instance1 form without causing your instance2 to "hang" and wait for completion. That might be an interesting direction to examine.

>The original motivation for this question was to enter into an adventure where I would extend my knowledge of VFP.

I thought the motivation was to solve your programming problem. :-) Let us know where your adventure leads you.