>>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 ;-)

I assume you're worried about the size of your exe, because you may need to distribute it over a slow connection, right?

So, the first thing that crossed my mind is to reduce the memo bloat in classlibs - that was a weak spot in vfp6. Second, you may write an utility which would check your project for unused classlibs. I've seen that a lot; a classlib gets included into a project at some point, and then kept there even when the classes in it are not in use at all. It gets compiled into the exe each time.

Now writing such an utility is not an easy thing - if you're having anything that uses name expressions (including createobject(), newobject(), addobject(), do (lcprg), do form (lcFrm)...) to denote components to use/run, that's something that won't be found by project manager. Such a cleanup would be very hard to write and nearly impossible to make foolproof.