John,

There is no magic going on in the menu. It's all just Fox code that you put into it. And there must be some set of differences between the way your menu is firing the forms compared to the way your buttons are launching them.

>the DE is used as whatever the vfp default is. when using the vfp menu system it works fine, but opening the forms via buttons causes file opening conflicts. really wierd! perhaps someone at M$ could put in 2c worth and tell us if there are any file handling things hidden in the menu system.