I agree with you and disagree with Craig about the COM object encompassing the biz rules, I had to do that in couple of Apps couple of years ago and was successful for the most part. However, as far as performance, there is a lot of fine lines to walk. For sometime, I chose to compile the middle layer as a separate exe when it was all VFP layers to speed up the App and simpilfy the deployment process. Definitely old WS running Pentium I or older can get bugged down running those Apps and memory and HD space on all WS have to be considered too when you are looking at N tier design.