Don,

> I have never understood why that is not an inherent part of a pageframe class ... but it isn't ... so we do what we have to do ...

VFP behaves this way for performance reasons, it's silly to waste CPU cycles refreshing nonvisible pages.

>OR ... just put ... this.refresh ... in the activate method of each page of your pageframe.

There are several reasons that's a non-optimal solution:

1) It requires programmer time for every pageframe ever used
2) It requires the programmer to remember to do it for every page, including those added after the initial layout design
3) If it's forgotten it will be a bug, wasting significant amouts of time for testers, users and developers
4) Inheritance provides a rather elegant solution to the problem and to ignore this means there are some fundamental O-O concepts that are being ignored in the design
5) this.refresh() is not needed for every activation event of the page so it can waste a significant amount of time for the enduser