Mike,

I discovered this a long time ago, maybe all the way back while I was using VFP3. I found that "development debugging" output to the screen affected the repaint. ?? "" is enough to wake VFP out of some fugue state as far as the background repaint is concerned. I ended up putting that into my app framework as a normal part of startup.

I've suggested that VFP ought to do that internally whenever _screen.Picture is set to some non-empty value.

>Thanks a million for that tip. How did you ever figure that one out? Very nice indeed.