William,
In VFP, keep object references to your forms by using the NAME and LINKED clauses in the DO FORM command. There are various methods for doing this efficiently using a forms collection class or application properties to hold the references. Then you can say myform.hide() or myform.show() where myform is an object reference to a form.
HTH
Eric Kleeman - EDS Consulting Services
MCP Visual FoxPro
MCSD C#.NET
Hua Hin Thailand
Los Angeles California