I am sorry to hear that, Ed, as that defeats the spirit of what the UT is about, and I know you have contributed significantly to the VFP community for quite some time. You appear to be very knowledgeable along with your associate Craig. His posts have been very helpful, and I believe I even saw one of his previous posts speaking of a batch file to install Crystal (may have been Walter). I bet you did not make those comments to them! Moreover, while both Craig and Walter seemed knowledgeable enough to make that decision for themselves based on their environments, experiences, etc.

Most of my DLLs and OCXs are installed "safely", and I have been fortunate not to have to rely on many. I created an "updater class" for our applications which is very careful not to overwrite anything we did not write or control without notification and management by MIS/Lan admins. I am also an MCSE (3.5x,4x) and CNE (since 2.x, 3.x,4.x). I detest when other companies overwrite controls and shared libraries without notification, and I am very careful not to do it myself. The only control we really need to worry about is MSCOMCTRL.OCX, and I do not know of any installations where this has ever been an issue. All of the other libraries VFP relies on have not been a problem for us in the past...who knows what happens going forward. Hopefully in the long term Windows 2K's active directory and tighter file system will protect us all, though I am sure it will be rough in the short term.

I just don't want to add to my problems unless I understand what they are.
That is why I am concerned about Crystals requirements, along with the fact that I am still not quite sure where it hooks and why. I can use the dependency checker on some of the DLLs, but I am still trying to figure out the ramifications and recipes that won't cause constant problems for not only my application, but my clients other applications as well.

Ed, no one solution is ever right in all situations, and with each new release of an operating system we have a multitude of issues to deal with. I simply pointed out that Crystal's requirements dramatically raised the bar in our situation, and people need to see the positives and the negatives in order to make the right decisions for their environments. We have not decided 100% against Crystal, as it does offer greater backend support. Crystal, like VFP, is a tool, and as you add tools, you add complexity. Some are acceptable, some are not.

If you did not intend to insult, I can accept that (even though that is not what you said). I just wanted to point out to you that implying someone is not intelligent because they raise an issue or concern doesn't help anyone, and it was probably out-of-character for you. If that is the case, I hope that we can be mature and continue the spirit of these forums.