Jim,

>And many of us are disinclined to use the official Joe Average route because feeding black holes is a useless exercise...

You amaze me, Jim. All of that "black hole" business in spite of Microsoft's request to everyone testing the public beta (please pay special attention to paragraph two).

From "VFP9 Beta Release Notes.htm" included in the Release Notes download:

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Beta Feedback
We are very interested in what you think about the Visual FoxPro 9 beta. If you wish to report any bugs you find during your testing of the beta, or provide any other feedback, please navigate to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/support/default.aspx and click the Submit a Bug Report link. Follow the instructions there, and be sure to specify that you are using the Visual FoxPro 9 Beta.

There will be other online forums available for Visual FoxPro 9.0 Beta feedback such as the Universalthread. While it is fine to talk about features and bugs on these public forums, we appreciate that bug reports be submitted on the above Microsoft web page since the product team will monitor this location more closely.
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Does that sound like a "black hole" and a "useless exercise" to you?