>In my database designer I'm assigning relationships between all the primaries keys in my tables, that then I drag onto the forms I'll be using. My boss, who knows some VFP says they are not truly reliable and that it's better to create your own as you go. What do you guys think?

For my $.02 US, I've only used persistant relationships in one project, where they wanted cascading deletes available in some areas and wanted to prevent the user from deleting parent records with children in other areas. Worked great, but there was a definite performance hit in almost every area.