>We are looking for ways to speed up object instantiation for a large number of objects
>
In addition to all the advice you have gotten so far, let me add a totally different idea into it...

You say there are hundreds of fields. Have you considered an HTML page? This would require only ONE control on the form, a web browser. You could also front end the web brower control by instanting it at startup to get it into the application spaces menu.

The other advantage with a browers is it will start to render the page (make it visible) before all of the controls have been rendered.

***************

Baring that a few more questions/areas you can check to speed up your form init:

1. How deep are your control classes. Are you MANY levels down from the VFP base classes? The deeper your class hierarchy is, the more classes VFP has to load. So, if you have a very deep classes you could look at flatening them out and using hook classes for any specialized behavior.

2. Are you using access/asign events in your controls. I remember reading somewhere that classes that use them take 3 to 5 times longer to instantiate (which is what is happening to the control when you add object it to the form.)

3. Also, people have talked about delaying instantiation. Another thing you can do is delay binding. Non-bound controls should instantiate faster too. you can use the refresh to populate them with the value you want to display, and when the user tabs to a field you can bind it.

4. Finally, like some others have said, consider a small redisgn. Move some of the controls off of your form to child forms which come up when the user pushes a button. I would expect you can indentify a large percentage of the items on your form as less important or less often looked at.

Good luck to ya...

BOb