I think VFP is trying to be efficient by performing a few things at the same time and it's not allowing the connection to be created before the views are created.
We've pretty much proved this by 1) stepping through the code and manually verifying the connection just before the code that creates the views is executed or 2) actually closing the database after the connection has been created then reopening it in order to create the remote views.
But in either case we've work around it by closing the database after creating the connections and reopening it to create the remote views. This seems to be working for us.
Thanks!