>Now, every time I need to modify the base table, I need to modify all the views based on it. And for every view I am forced to specify again and again the width for fields.


If you haven't yet, check out my EView utility here in the files section. The VFP view designer does a lot of funky stuff to views when you edit them with it, and EView doesn't do any of that, and allows easy editing of view properties that the designer doesn't give access to.