>>When I issue screen.visible = .F. from my startup program, I get an error in a seemingly unrelated place in my main form's init event "unknown object blah blah..." On top of this, the login screen never shows up, and EVERYTHING disappears, even from the list that appears when pressing ctrl+alt+del. Restarting windows gives my "Are you sure you want to exit the program?" messagebox displayed from the application's shutdown, but this is the only hint left of my application running. MS articles say that '_screen.visible = .F.' should be issued at the very beginning of the main program.., but this has never worked for me- what I am I doing wrong?
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>I saw that _SCREEN.Left=-2000 is much more reliable idea (I don't know why). Surely, after this all forms should have Desktop=.T.

Looks like I overlooked the desktop property. I thought that if the main form had its desktop property set to .T., and all other forms had showwindow = 1 (in top level form) then all the forms should be visible but that isn't the case.
As for making the form invisible as opposed to moving it off of the screen, I chose invisible because it also hides the duplicate button on the command bar. Do you know of a way around this when using '_screen.left = -2000'?