I'm not sure what you mean by statusbar, two things come to mind, the title bar at the top, which you can address through:
[tt]me.caption = "my new form title"[/tt]
or the Access statusbar, which you can play with using syscmd
[tt]varreturn=syscmd(accsyscmdsetstatus,"this is a test")[/tt]
arguements for InitMeter, RemoveMeter, UpdateMeter...
Or are you thinking of using the statusbartext property of controls? That would be displayed whenever a control has focus, but I don't think there is one for forms. Hint - what you put in the description part in the table design view, will usually be displayed in the statusbar when a control has focus (inherited to forms).
(hmmm - application.statusbar, is that Access? Is it perhaps present in 2003?)
Roy-Vidar