VFP 9 Status Bar

My VFP9 program starts with a PRG file that sets up menus.
This menus give access to lots of different forms.
In the PRG and in the INIT of some of those forms I call a procedure that
writes some text in the status bar.
When I run the program in a fast network the text that I want to write in
the status bar appears without any problem.

But when I use a very slow network, I first see a message like "record 40"
in the status bar and only after that the text I want appears in the status
bar.
One of the forms in which this happens has a grid that shows data from a
free table. It opens a free table, jumps to the end of the table.

Is there a way to stop VFP from writing anything at all in the status bars,
so that we can use the status bar to show what ever text we want?

Thanks in advance