>>>Milford.....
>>>
>>>In addition you might.....
>>>
>>>Public start_date, end_date
>>>start_date = {}
>>>end_date = {}
>>>
>>
>>Just FYI, it's not necessary to declare these variables as public- they will be private by default, and therefore visible to the called form.
>
>They will be visible till Form's Init. Then they go out of scope... At least, I have this problem before...

If the form is modal, they will be visible for the life of the form. The reason that your variables went out of scope is that the form you were calling was modeless, which means after the form's init method, the calling routine (that created the variables) ran its course, finished, and the variables went out of scope.