>>>>
>>>>The key word is in bold...why take the chance?
>>Or, put another way, what specific requirement do you have that is best overcome by a public variable?
>
>In projects where I hard-code the form GUI's, it seems (that) runtime won't recognize them unless the name is declared public. I try not to do it, but runtime hiccups - and then I have to.

Terry,

That might be because PUBLIC actually does create a variable whereas PRIVATE does not - it only causes any similarly named variable previously created to be hidden from here down.

You may get the result you need by declaring a PRIVATE and then actually creating a memvar with the PRIVATEd name.

Goos luck
Jim Nelson