>1. Speed - VFP opens tables and views faster if included in the Dataenvironment.

Pardon, Larry, but I'm not sure I see why this would be a factor, particularly in a very busy form it would seem it might even be slower.

The main reason I find for not using the DE is cases where the tables are opened from completely variable paths based on selection criteria from another process - only USE works with that situation. E.g., I have 2,000 tables all with the same structure but different names, in various folders used by one form depending on path parameters like year, month, industry, etc. the user selects.

Even for this, you can use a "dummy" DE (like for a cursor-based report) to set up the basic functionality, and then remove it when design is done.