Craig I used your routine for the last several year under heavy load also and have never had a problem.

Thanks for the routine
Gaylen

>Yup.. it surprised me how fast it really is under a heavy load. I've run it in an environment with a couple of hundred users and didn't hear a peep about performance. Many others have emailed me and said the same thing.
>
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>>Your method makes a lot of sense. You prevent machine #2 from reading and grabbing a lock on a record right after machine #1 finds the record and *doesn't* get the lock. And the file won't be locked long.