>>In my tests, it did seem to show up in the calling process, and the same behavior occurred when you normally (no dialog) pressed F1. Of course, I may have been looking at the wrong thing or different things, but I don't think I did. Wouldn't be the first (and probably not the last) time that I futzed up a test like this.
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>That's where I was missing it. I never checked the process only the main window. Also, I had the Command window active and that was processing the message (that's what you meant by no dialogs). Although I know I tried closing that and I didn't see any difference in the main window but I tried it again today and it was there. Too long on the same issue, I guess.
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>>As I mentioned to Neil, what I'm guessing is that VFP's been set up to respond to the WM_HELP message only when it's the active window and/or has the keyboard focus. If it doesn't it may be ignoring the message. Given what I've seen, it's the only possible explanation I can come up with. Of course, if I screwed up the tests, this theory may be invalid as well, and your's might be the right answer.
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>Going through it some more, it looks like it does send it correctly, however, the problem may be in the HELPINFO structure it passes. It fills the structure with information pertaining to the Messagebox window (e.g. CtrlID and ContextID). It could be that VFP discards any help message with a HELPINFO structure it can't work with. I don't know of any way to change that information. Maybe MessageBoxIndirect??

The structure was actually my first guess at what the problem was/is. Maybe Randy or Mike or Ricardo from MS might jump in a give us the lowdown (not that it'll solve anything, mind you< g >).

In thinking about it, MessageBoxEx() would be very good for error handling. Currently, I use the MESSAGEBOX() function, but it's limiting. However, being able to call a help file with detailed information as to the problem and what the fix is, would be a great improvement. All you'd have to do is set the ON KEY LABEL F1 to the appropriate help topic, then restore the previous when you're done.

Unfortunately, you couldn't use MessageBoxIndirect() directly from within VFP because the structure requies one member to be the address of a callback function.