>FIRST. I am not sure that I have service pack 1. My VFP specs are:
>VFP 7.0 1988-2001 ver 07.00.00000.9262
>I have looked into the VFP directory in Program Files and do not see anything about service pack 1. I see on the msft web site that there is an 11MB service pack available for download. Is this the file?

You don't have SP1 installed. VFP7SP1 is build 9465. You can get SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=B1BFB6C2-261E-4B7D-8838-8DCD5478A9EB

>SECOND. I wrote a config.fpw file and put it in the c:\program files\VFP7.0 directory. The file had one statement: COMMAND= CHDIR. When I started VFP, I got the notification: “Command is missing required clause”. Don’t know what this means?

I don't get any errors with

COMMAND= CHDIR.

in the config.fpw