>Can anyone tell me whether it's possible to 'hide' a control on a form so that it is not counted in a control count? This issue has arisen because a query I'm working with tries to use all of the controls on the form in its count and display, and I have several at the top which are for read only purposes (and from another table besides).

I do that, but I really have a custom property for all of my classes, which is called .say (for mental compatibility reasons, because I've never really used SAY on a variable on a form in FPD, it was always Get Disable, so it could Show Get). Then when I do a run like that, it goes like this:
for zz=1 to alen(this.tabf)
with thisform.controls(this.tabf[zz])
.enabled=!.say
endwith
endf

In my case, tabf[ ] is an array property on the form class used to hold some indexes into the form.controls[ ] array (i.e. only those which are bound, belong to one of my classes, and have a .say property; they can be checked directly instead (running for zz=1 to thisform.columncount), but I prefer to have them enumerated at form.init() time, because of speed and the array being used elsewhere, too. This is probably not exactly what you need, but I HTH as a hint.