>I'm loading a bunch of bmp's and .MSK files for my command buttons from my NT server. Sometimes it hangs. Are there any network permissions we need to access the .BMP and .MSK files in fox? (ie: is read-only ok or should we have write, execute??)

There's no need for either write or execute permissions; I take it that these are individual files, not bound into an executable. There are several possible solutions:

(1) Are there a lot of files in a single directory? The time to open a file increases dramatically as the size of the directory grows. You mght consider splitting them into several smaller subfolders.

(2) These are static files; is there any reason not to copy them over to the local system? Accessing a file from a local hard drive will be considerably faster than loading across a network, and will lessen network contention.

(3) What control(s) are being used to display these images? You might consider experimenting with using one of the lightweight ActiveX image controls, particularly on machines with limited memory.

(4) You might also want to try adjusting VFP's allocation of RAM as disk buffer space using the SYS(3050) function; it may be that contention between VFP's disk buffers and the memory needed for video buffering is causing swap file activity; reducing VFP's consumption of RAM for buffers may reduce the need for page file activity, at a relatively small cost in query performance - you'll need to experiment to find the right mix.

(5) Are these machine configured with limited memory? In many cases, adding another 32-64MB of RAM to a system will given benefits that far exceed the small cost of the memory; you can experiment on one machine, and if adding memory to that system makes a dramatic improvement in performance, this will serve to justify upgrading other systems; an initial invest of ~$60 as a test might pay off bery well.