James,

I agree it would be a nice feature to have, I don't think it's a "grave design flaw" in VFP.

>I was not really talking about instantiation time, but more about design. Its easier to just drop a control on a form then set its instantiation order than it is to write (or copy) the code into a method that addobject() the control.

So write yourself a little builder to do this.

>I do not agree that firing order is irrelevant to 99+% of the applicactions written -- it seems all of the applications I write have firing order concerns.

You are just one developer out of 500K, and this isn't an issue that widely causing problems on the millions (that's why I had that many significat digits *s*) of VFP forms running right now.

>This seems to be an area in which we just disagree and it does not seem that either one of us is going to persuade the other.

Yup.