Yes, it seems the OS (WinAPI) is taking car of the GIF animation, VFP here makes use of gdiplus, as far as I know, and so the image control displaying images just inherits what the gdiplus library does with them, including PNG and GIIF transparency (two different concepts) and GIF animation.
There is a downside to this, as it does show activity and suggests progress, even when VFP really would be choked into an endless loop not getting out. But you can argue for it in that a timer would often be a too early indicator of VFP being stuck, while it's just busy executing SQL.
At least one situation got a lot better, if a thread is stuck, that usually only affects one CPU core and single core CPUs have become rare. It's not just XP and later Windows versions, that got more stable, it's mainly multiple cores that removed the threat of a single core being stuck, now the OS can kill processes from cores using other cores, The OS - I think - will run its major process control loop doing multithreading and multiprocessing with the cores on multiple cores itself, this isn't just one OS process with one thread on one core and this also isn't a mechanism running in total separation on each core, so cores can control each other, too, at least in kernal mode code. (If you don't know, OS code usually has some more privileges in the CPU doing things no normal process is capable to do in kernal mode, which includes directly writing into memory of any process and likely also assigning cores to processes or vice versa).
Bye, Olaf.
Olaf Doschke Software Engineering
