>I really wanted to just hide the form in certain instances. When I call the parent form with noshow, my application just goes away. Should I give up on hide, what about the visible property?

There really is no need to hide the form or set its visible property to false if your "determination" code is in the INIT as long as the child form is modal. Just call this child form from the INIT. When the chilc form is closed, the INIT continues to fire, then the form displays.