Jim,

Sorry, now I see that I didn't describe a situation properly. 'Topic' is ActiveX which is placed on a form in design time. My point was that it should be already created with proper object handle before Activate comes. When I activate/deactivate a form which is already on a screen there is no need to do any checking for existence, but for the very first Activate this check is required for some reason ? I found this behaviour weird.

>
>A property can be of type object and still not hold an object reference. This would be a property of type object with a value of NULL. You can fix your code to handle this by doing the following;
>
>

>...
>IF TYPE('thisform.topic' ) = 'O'  AND NOT ISNULL(Thisform.Topic)
>...
>