I truly appreciate the many comments from all sides on my original question. May I return to one of questions, and give some background?

I am a lawyer, not a programmer, but I have studied very hard to learn FP and then VFP and brought my agency (240 employees) from storing data in Wang word processing documents (yes!) to running a custom VFP app that has many features such as OLE links to Word and to Groupwise for scheduling and email. I consider myself very proficient in VFP but have no formal training as a programmer (although these days I do database work full time). When I deploy an app, it usually contains a few bugs that I discover after people start running it, and people are always wanting changes.

One of the things I love about VFP is the ability to compile my forms as apps and store them on a file server. Users run those apps, leaving me free to debug and improve the forms while people are working away on the apps. I simply upload another app when I'm done. The next time they restart the VFP EXE, it runs the latest app and everybody is happy.

Before I spend taxpayer $ on VB and my time in learning it, I would like to make sure that I can use this procedure, or something similar. I want to have an EXE on local drives for performance reasons, and I want the flexibility of being able to update code on the server. I can do this in VFP; what about VB?

(BTW, about half our machines are 486/66 with 16 megs and no upgrades in sight. A thinner client would probably make a difference.)

All comments warmly appreciated.

Ross