>>You should use properties not variables in such case. You can pass m.cntr1 as a parameter to the form...<<

Thanks, Sergey, I appreciate your input and I hope for your advice in the sure to come up future questions.

Please understand though - and I explicitly commented the example - that this is code from the late eighties / early nineties where I ran this XP (cross platform <grin>) DOS / Mac / Win multi-user with my own codepage translation... I e.g. got a very nice generalized search engine and many other features in it that I don´t want to throw away.

I KNOW that only recently added code (or tuned examples <g>) obeys naming conventions, that there are a thousand PUBLIC variables I want to turn into properties,...

What I´m currently doing is to add more #IF VERSION()="V" code and my core app now compiles and runs on 2.6 and 7 and even on the Mac <grin>. As soon as I´ve shifted everything I´m gonna freeze it and use ver-7-only features and get rid of legacy code.

Thanks for bearing with me
G