David,

>'temporarily recreste a view with that name, edit the form, remove the view from the DE, them delete the view from the DBC.'
>
>seems safer, and I will do this next time, or hopefully, not delete an object that is referenced in the de, prior to deleting the object itself!

I'd go that route if I ever needed to do this.

>since, when I deleted only the cursor record in the scx, and not the DE record itself in the SCX, vfp crashed and or the form wouldn't load. In this case this wasn't a big deal, because it was the only object in the DE. But if it was one of many, then it would be a big pain.

Ok the problem here is that the DE row knows that it is the parent to N rows of cursors (although the number stored is N+1 because it includes the DE row in the count). If you delete one of those you need to update the Reserved2 memo field.