>I tried the hex editor, and the header does not look the way I expected. I cannot pick out any field names from the garble. Still, the file is regularly read and written by the executable, and I know it started life as a FoxPro table.
>
>Does anyone know why Recover was fooled into thinking it could not open the file exclusively?

Maybe the file is a bit encrypted and there's no other software that can read it but the app itself? In that case, my first suggestion would still work.