>Thanks for the insight of ProMatrix that helps me confirm my suspecion but I suspect they have complained which gives me concern that this will probably not get fixed anytime soon. So I have to structure the design to the dev environment and not the problem at hand.

Maybe you misunderstood me about VPM - they have used this as a means to have their app compile even if the lowest level classlibs were absent (they were blank subclasses of the framework level classes), because the framework level classlibs were in the path, and the classes had same names.

VFP won't let you do this (not directly), to

create class {name} of a.vcx as {same name} from b.vcx

but it can be achieved through some hacking or renaming and redefining in class browser. They got it to work because at compile time the local classes were in Set Classlib list (while parent classes were not - they were mentioned only as parent classes). I figured this is the way VPM managed to work around this problem.

As soon as I changed the path or Set Classlib, I was getting a problem similar to yours. It was in 5.0 and/or 6.0 (not later than SP3).