>Perhaps I am living on borrowed time. I cannot tell you how many users and applications I have installed on a server and mapped the user machine to the server application. But a guess would be 50 applications/customers and a total of about 1000 users. The clients include water districts, state and local government offices and UC Berkeley as well as several international companies. Should I say so far so good? Perhaps not! I might go home tonight and get a call from a client confirming your statement. Many of the guys I have worked with over the years also do this.
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>When I install the exe on a user machine I do install the runtimes or it will not work.

It doesn't matter where the .EXE resides; if the runtime files are not at a minimum present in the Windows search path, VFP executables, including out of process servers, are not going to run reliably on a target system. Relying on any COM functionality in the executable is going to bring things down that much faster. Spawning a second VFP executable will also accelerate the problems. You don't have to believe me; look at the .DEP file generated by Setup Wizard for inclusion of the runtime to see what cross relationships exist.

All I can say is I would not rely on anything like this, especially if the starts in folder is different than the location of the executable. Of course, I have no clue as to how any of this works...