>Thank you for the reply. The top form only is modeless whilst the others are modal. The main issue I have is that I cannot pinpoint when the 'event' occurs that selects the modal form. It leaves the modal form 'selected' on the bottom of a stack of other forms which won't move and I generally have to give the three finger salute to get out. Most disconcerting. If only it wasn't so random.

Aha. I asked that because I've had the same thing occur with "stacking modals" you might call them. I think this was vfp6, might've been early vfp7, and don't know if problem still exists in vfp8. As you say, it is tough to reproduce with regularity.

It turned out that in my case there were a couple property flaws in a few of the modals, which did not generate the usual errors, but instead behaved as your forms are doing. I don't recall specifics real well, except that it was something like where an assigned controlsource could not be located, or an assigned Value variable could not be found for textboxes, etc.

I eventually solved it by noting which modals encountered the problem, and then going through every control on those (as well as the modal directly beneath the one where focus went haywire) to verify every single control was perfect. I found a few cases where either a variable/controlsource was OOS or misspelled, and once repaired, everything worked fine again.

The only really strange thing was that the bad assignments did not cause errors, but rather only the strange focus behavior. Go figure...