Vera,

>When I click on the VFP title bar while processing my program, to force VFP to refresh, a white bar appears where the menubar should be and the taskmanager shows VFP as 'not responding'. After my program is done processing, everything turns back to normal. And again: this only happens if I do some other things than just starting my program after VFP is started.

This is an indication that VFP is currently doing something like a long running SQL statement either against it's own data or against some backend. There is not much you can do about it. If it's a local select you can try adding a call to a UDF that will call doevents but that can seriously hurt the overall performance. If it's a backend select you can try changing to an asynchronous connection then go into a polling loop.