My application's history goes back to the early Foxbase days so please bear with me if what I am trying to do seems strange or unnecessary.

The application begins by loading some data, executing some menus and then a read events. I would like the menus to work like they did long ago =) meaning I would like them to automatically drop down so that the user can see all the options on a particular menu pad without having to hit alt-M to bring down the pad. So I use the following in my startup code which works well:

do main.mpr
keyb "{alt-M}"
read events

And so at the end of each procedure code of the menu bars I make the last command "ALT-C" or whatever to bring down the menu pad and this works fine.

However, it does not work at all with when there is no pad to pull down because the ALT-C or whatever actually executes the code.

If I make the last line of code in the menu bar procedure codes "activate menu _msysmenu" it activates the menu the way I want, but on the down side it stops processing the code until a menu option is selected. At which time a "on menu selection.." is executed. And so I quickly get to the max nesting depth after the user picks 20 or 30 menu options.

When I try to use "activate menu _msysmenu NOWAIT" or "activate menu _msysmenu pad (mpad) NOWAIT", the nesting problem is solved but it does not activate the menu at all. In fact it doesnt appear to do anything at all.

The behaviors described are consistent in VFP6 and VFP8. Any suggestions, explanations or giggling at my old programming style are greatly appreciated.