>how can i randomly choose between ms agent characters programmatically in my visual app?

Assuming, that you've lnMax characters, you can put characters names into array or cursor, generate random # betwen 1 and lnMax and than pick the character based on that.

* Issue RAND(-1) to get a seed based on the system clock
RAND(-1)
lnMin = 1
lnMax = 3

...

lnNum = INT((lnMax - lnMin + 1) * RAND( ) + lnMin