Chris,

You pretty much have to verify that all of the settings are the same between the IDE and the COM runtime environment if you want to track down why it works one way and not the other.

There are three things I do to test VFP COM components

1) instantiate it as a plain VFP object, this gives you a complete debug environment

2) start a new VFP session and instantiate it as a COM object, this lets you at least inspect object properties in the debugger, but you can't trace into the code.

3) instnatiate it in the true runtime environment. Debugging in this fashion requires your COM to log activity to a textfile or a dbf. I prefer txt files, which can be opened in IE and you can simply hit the refresh button to see any new log info.

You also need to make sure that you have an adequate error handler setup in the Error method of your hierarchy to give you decent diagnostics of errors that happen inside the object.

>Thanks - the file looks OK and appears to reflect the settings I have made ie. set multilocks on etc... Sorry to be dense - what should I be looking for other than these settings?