Like cows to the slaughter, or at least lemmings over the cliff, programmers often use the default options of their tools without thinking. If you're a VB 6.0 programmer, here's some stuff you should and some more you could do. These are all under "Tools, Options..."

1.) Editor Tab: Unclick "Auto Syntax Check". There no reason you need an alert box to pop up every time you leave a line and it's not syntaxically (sp?) correct. It highlights in red even with this option off, and when you're going to cut and paste text -- meaning that you're not leaving the line permanently -- the alert's just a nuisance. You know what I mean.

2.) Click (still Editor tab) "Requre Variable Declaration". Option Explicit is your friend. Misspellings that become wacky Variants are not. If you misspell a variable name and this is checked off, the error is a tough to find logical error, not a syntaxical (there's that fake word again!) one.

3.) Under "Editor Format" tab -- Use the font and font size you prefer. This one took me over a year to finally use. Looser.

4.) General Tab -- Click "Break on Unhandled Errors". No reason to stop when you've got the error covered.

5.) Environment -- Click "Prompt to Save Changes" so that the IDE asks if you want to save every time you run the program. Why? Ever heard of an infinite loop? Save those changes before you have to force-quit VB 6.0.

Thus ends the lesson.