Dominic,

Craig has given you some good information on your other issues, let me give you assistance on the one below.

>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'.

In VFP 7, go to the Tools menu and choose Intellisense Manager. On the General Tab of the Intellisense Manager in the upper left corner is a check box labeled "Enable Intellisense". Make sure that box is unchecked and then click OK. That will shut off intellisense for you.