>The form appears, the caption is set, but no table is loaded. It looks to me as if the DataEnvironment's init method executes before the form's so the tablename property hasn't been initialized yet.

This is firing order of events:

DE BeforeOpenTables
Form Load
Cursor Init
DE Init
Control Init
Form Init
....
If want your controls assigned the proper controlsource you should open tables a long before Form Init event - the best place is Load.