>I am ready to launch a large project in VFP and find that the tables and views in the forms data environment are bound to the development tables and there is no way to point the forms to the live data when it resides elsewhere, even if it is in the path and has the same directory names, etc. What gives? There must be an easier way. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

Mike,
Don't bother. On target computer if that path doesn't exist then it would be searched and used from serach path. ie: For test rename your original path to something else and set path to a new dir where same DBC and tables exist with different data.
Cetin