>>Ed, wath mean Vladimir Zhuravlev at http://www.levelextreme.com/Magazine/November2002/Page14.asp ??
>
>It sounds like he's hiding the UI status of a control within a container; why not ask him, since it's his writing?
>
>Rather than a timer, I'd probably try using an interruptible timer API object, since that's clearly not a UI element; the timer, interacting with the event loop of the host process, is a UI element.
>
>BTW, idle forms are always between lines of code, sitting at the READ EVENT.

Re-reading what he said, it looks like he's spawning the long-running process and not reestablishing the session; the 'ticking time' is an artifact of the local copy of VFP, not of the server process. The timer, being spawned in the method, maintains the session context, so it could be used to reestablish the connection to t he client, except that it stops running after invoking a separate method (the split method reference I made.) I don't know (and he didn't say) how his server raised an event in the client at the end of the long-running process; it's possible that he didn't, and so there's no problem.