Well, I finally figured it out. This may make sense to people who program for a living but not to me.
I was testing this on my home network. VFP was running on the "server" and I was testing the EXE on my laptop (part of the network). As long as VFP was running on the server, the EXE would not run. As soon as I closed VFP, everything worked fine. Have I discovered a bug, or am I just stupid? (Don't answer, please.)
Since I solved the problem, can I have myself 3 stars?

Thanks so much for all you time and help.
Ken