>If one of the big benefits of .NET is getting away from DLL H*!$ and all those registry problems, where does that leave VFP?

You cannot create DLLs with VFP, so the problem really doesn't apply. If you use DLLs that are COM based with VFP, then you may have the registery issues that do not exist with .NET components, but I don't think this is an issue for most VFP developers.