Al,

The problem stems from a known issue in the VFP's RI procedural code documented by Doug Henning a few years ago. During a cascading delete/update there is an ON ERROR command that controls how an error is handled during a delete or update. However, if you have any code in the error method of your form, the ON ERROR does not execute. So in my case, the 1539 error that is generated when the user-defined trigger on the child record failed, my form object's error method handled it but the __RI_DELETE procedure did not. Not knowing an error had occured, __RI_DELETE went ahead and deleted the parent record thereby orphaning the chile whose trigger had failed.

That's it...

Jeff