We found the root of the problem. We hacked the subclass in the VCX file and discovered some "funny" things.

In the properties memo field for the control was listed: selectonentry=1
This was strange since the ActiveX control does not have a native selectonentry property and we had not added a custom property of this name. We removed this entry, compiled the class and tried to execute it again but got the message: tooltip expression evaluated to an illegal value. So hacking the VCX again we found in the properties field: tooltiptext=()
We removed this property listing from the memo field and the control works great now.

We are not sure how these renegade properties made it to the property memo field for the control. But it would seem that VFP 7 ignores property assignments for non-existant properties and is quite fault tolerant.

VFP 8 on the other hand complains about things in the VCX that did not look right. Basically the VCX had become corrupted and VFP 7 was more liberal about letting the class execute ignoring the incorrect properties. VFP 8 was insisting that something was wrong and displaying an error messages of: "selectonentry property evaluated to an illegal value" or "syntax error". Neither of these errors made any sense until we hacked the VCX.

Thanks for your interest in helping us solve this problem.

Best Regards,

-Ryan