>So while you're in vfp6, you may want to write a project hook (did these exist in vfp6?) which will just go down each dbf-like object in the project and recompile+pack it, except itself of course - it would error out trying to recompile itself.

Yes in VFP6 SP5 this 'hook' can be attached as a 'project class'. We've had to do this in some cases. This is 1 reason for the question here. Are we getting deeper into a black hole, or should we go back to the 'kiss' method? Or with proper documentaion could new (OLD) programmers adapt with little loss of hair ;-)

Mike