Rodd, forgot something :

>Now, we want to (with the least amount of work) reuse that code (temporarily at least) in VFP. We know we can change our code to remove all uses of ??? and get things to run, but that would require quite a bit of work. So, what I'm actually looking for is solutions that would allow us to leave our ??? in place and continue to run.

Please bear in mind that a low-level program that reads all of your programs and re-generates them with the ??? replaced by whatever, only takes a few hours ! Once you are a bit experienced on it, this will really take you a few minutes (having the examples of similar things). Of course you have to re-distribute the app, but I have the hunch that you will have to do this anyway...

I you like, we even could do it for you ... $))