Rather than attempt to install the VFP7 runtime libraries on hundreds of client machines, we decided to copy the required dll's into the application folder. This should also make upgrading to new runtimes much easier.

VFP6 required 3 dll's to provide basic English language functionality (vfp6t.dll, vfp6r.dll and vfp6renu.dll). Initial testing showed that VFP7 required 4: (vfp7t.dll, vfp7r.dll, vfp7renu.dll and msvcr70.dll).

That was until we tried to run an application on an NT4 server. The first error was that urlmon.dll was required. Supplying this generated "The ordinal could not be located in dynamic link library shlwapi.dll". Further research suggested that an IE upgrade might resolve the issue, but this is not desirable in a live server environment.

At this point I decided to give up and rebuild the application in VFP6, only to discover that VFP7 had mangled the menu definitions in a non backwards compatible way (a fairly unimpressive move, given that all that was added was icon functionality).

All this is not very impressive for a VFP upgrade that could have got away with calling itself version 6.5. Is someone at Microsoft going to work out that they must start focussing on the tools that professionals need to build and distribute applications?

Obviously the majority of VFP7 development time went into Intellisense (but sadly not an easy way of switching it off) and some deeply flawed IDE 'improvements'.

Pending answers on the above, does any one actually know the bare bones library file distribution to run a VFP7 "hello world" application?