>I tried both suggestions with no luck. Where does the DOEVENTS go? Maybe I had it in the wrong place.

Sorry, you put the Thisform.Refresh() at the end of the Timer event and, as Jos said, put the DoEvents into the processing code like this:

LOCAL loSplash
DO FORM splash NAME loSplash LINKED
loSplash.SHOW()

*** Call first function
OpenTables()
*** Update Splash
DOEVENTS
*** Call next function
SetUpLibs()
*** Update Splash
DOEVENTS

Does that do it?