Thanks for the help, but I do have a top level form and a read events. That's what puzzles me so. I assume those two things are what it make it work OK when I run from within VFP. But I don't know why it is behaving differently when I run the executable.

You are definitely right that when I attempt to run the executable with screen = off,the application is running but I can't see it. I have to do an End Task to get it to close down. I can't understand why my top level form doesn't appear. I figure that if I could solve that, I could solve the whole problem. Any further comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.