Once, a very long time ago, I learned the elements of the FoxPro+ language for DOS. And I wrote a programme to store addresses, sort them and write the selected addresses in a format for 3x8 labels to a file (I never printed directly from FoxPro+). It was not a very elegant programme but it worked fine and I still rely on the corresponding DBF-table for my 1000plus addresses.

Then came Windows 3.1 and everything continued to work fine in a DOS-Box.

Then came Windows 95 with much faster CPUs. And all of a sudden the crucial command "set device to print" no longer worked (my PRG works with "set device to print", then SAY statements and then "set device to screen"). I always got "printer not ready". I tried to slow the execution down with the moslo.com command. But this did not help at all. I tried to transport the programme to FoxPro for Windows 2.5a. No deal.

My kludge around this was to take the 3.11 machine out of the cupboard when I wanted to create an address file. Rather clumsy.

Then came Windows XP with what they say is a better DOS-box than DOS. Well, maybe. But I now cannot even open my rather small FoxPro+. All I ever get (incidentally also under Windows 2000) is the "out of environment" error.

Now I have a choice. I can either learn the Visual FoxPro 7.0 language (I own the programme). This will take quite some time. Or I find somebody who can tell me what to write instead of "set device to print" when I want to write a file to disk. Perhaps it is easy, perhaps it is not and I will have to do it the hard way.