>I have a routine that uses a SELECT to create a cursor. If the cursor isn't created because the source file was missing, it is causing my GRID with recordsource/controlsource set to the cursor elements to fail. Can I put something in the GRID.INIT or GRID.LOAD to abort the grid if the cursor wasn't created?

You can return .f. from the grid's init and it would not be created. It doesn't have load event. However, it would not work anyway, so you have to create a dummy cursor in the form's load with the expecting structure of the real cursor.