>I've never gotten a straight or accurate answer from them when I have called M$ "tech support".

>As someone who used to work for Microsoft Product Support, I have to say that it was our job to give straight and accurate >answers. Did I give you a bad answer, or did you talk to other people?

Obviously, I was talking to other people. <g>

I did communicate with the M$ manager of NT Workstation (in '95) when I was having problems getting my dial-up connection working again after "upgrading" from Win95 to NT 4.0. He couldn't help but a client of a friend was able to get me back up and running. I had to move to NT because Foxpro development with WIn95 crashing a dozen times a day, was impossible...

Let's face it. WIndows and Foxpro and Office are all very large, complex products. There's no such thing as "bug-free" code and the larger the system, the more bugs there are and the deeper they're hidden.

My major bitch about M$ over the years is that I've felt that we were ALL alpha testers for their products -- They're so completely cash flow driven that taking the extra care to get rid of obvious problems just isn't in their plan. Maybe that's because I came up in the mainframe and then the mini-computer world where the kind of OS crashes and software bugginess that are "normal" for M$ products wasn't tolerated. I guess I was spoiled.

One of the main reasons I brought this thread up is that I feel that I have a larger voice in the Open Source world and access to more information and help than I have ever had from M$. That's why I'd like to see my favorite application development tool, VFP, available to me on an Open Source OS.