hmmm, I'm clueless about patching for MFC6  - is there a way for me to explore this without unduly burdening someone else? DMC still has life in it for me if I can figure a way to use MFC 6.

What do you need from MFC6.  I switched from MS MFC6 to DMC and I only needed to address extra functions in the CString class and a few #defines for some control classes.  Otherwise the code was fine. Of course there are MS specific things like #import that you won't have, but usually you can code around that.  Also the debugger is les user friendly, but I don't make too many mistakes.  :)

Andy