>I have been playing around with Paintbrush and msdraw. I can load Paintbrush via activex, but unfortunately i cannot pass in a reference to a picture and load the picture, neither can I save the picture

Try adding an OLE Container to your form, and when it asks you what you want in it, say "Create from file" and find the Bitmap you want to use. DOubleClicking on the control at runtime turns VFP into MSPaint. I think DoVerb() can put it in Edit mode too. As for saving, I'm not quite sure how it works, but yu can probably get it to work.