>What are the dangers of taking just the DBF from one directory and copying it into another directory with the same named DBF and the associated CDX file?

The CDX may be completely off-base... it may contain keys to nonexistent records, or keys that were changed. Fox may or may not detect this when it opens the file - depending on how different they are and also on version. Newer versions of Fox are stricter with this.

You may see any number of errors - record is out of range would be the most common, but a C0000005 wouldn't surprise me, either.

However, if all the keys in the cdx are based on the fields which do exist in the newly copied table, open it exclusively, reindex and you should have an usable index. OF course, if any key() expression can't be eval()uated, you'll receive a "variable not found" or some such error as soon as you try to Set Order to that tag, or maybe as soon as you open the table.

If the table is in a DBC, and you copy it over a table with not identical structure, best of luck with Validate Database Recover... which works most of the time.