Ken,

A thoughtful reply, thank-you, and I have no quick answer.

I will say this, and then probably pause and gather my thoughts. It is no fantasy that VFP has something of a bad reputation. Even two years ago it was not as bad as it is now. There are plenty of powerful people who honestly believe it has been discontinued, is not very useful, and so forth.

For this reason, putting *any* VFP runtime in with Windows would be a powerful statement. I think that if you, and I mean you, Ken Levy, wanted it to happen, it would. Maybe not as has been suggested here, but definitely in a way that would benefit developers and users alike. After all, do we want VFP to survive and thrive just because we have some personal taste that runs in that direction, or is it because it is an incredibly powerful tool that delivers powerful apps to users? If the latter, than Microsoft's own statements on what their mission is require them to find a way to make it easier to deliver this to users world-wide.

As for whether or not they are system files, I heard a joke a long time ago that lays that to rest. Q: What is an operating system? A: Whatever Microsoft decides to release next.

>>But surely we can expect plenty of service packs for Windows /*vbg*/, and each would have the latest VFP runtime, no?
>
>What if you had a custom property on a form called foo, then a new version of VFP was released with a new foo property. When the VFP runtime files were updated on a machine from an operation system patch/udpate, your application would break.