Hi Jack,
See in-line answers.

>If you place the DLLs in a shared directory on the server, is the user not penalized with LOTS of extra network overhead as the pages in the DLLs are paged in and out of memory?
>

If you have the EXE as well as the DLLs on the netwrok, the initial load of the program is very slow because the files need to be downloaded from the network and loaded into memory (both actual and virtual). This takes a bit of time depending on network bandwidth. Once loaded, it runs no differently than if they were local.

>If you have the DLLs in the directory with your application (EXE), must they still be registered in the System Registry, or can you really just point a new workstation at the EXE and let it rip?

VFP DLLs do not need to be registered in order to run most VFP applications. The VFPXR.DLL file does contain the VisualFoxPro.Application COM server but if you don't need it, you don't have to register it. Most of the functionality is available via library calls and that type of DLL does not need to be registered.

HTH.