John,

>The reason I put the call to the menus in the activate of my child forms is because I am going to have a seperate menu for each child form and I wanted to make sure that the menu was executed each time the particular child form was active.

That makes perfect sense then.

>I am curios though about one thing though. When would someone determine to use the top level form and place the child forms in the top level form? is this just a developers preference instead of using in screen.

I've done apps both ways, it's just a matter of preference and what works. Sometimes the app doesn't need the VFP screen, if it's just a simple little dialog we can create them as top level forms. To accomplish this in VFP3 I'd just resize the VFP window down around my form and that worked just great.

For other larger apps it's useful to the client and myself to have one big bounding window _screen and everything goes on inside of it.