Borislav
Thank you for responding. The problem still persists. The error: "Cursor canNot be updated because it contains an unsaved record" occurs just after a scatter and fails on the gather. The alias() = poitems. I overkilled the update and append blank with the following code:

 WAIT WINDOW 'clsFrmAddOnly.acti: in gAddLike: ALIAS() = ' + ALIAS()
* TABLEUPDATE(1,.t.,'poItems')
 TABLEUPDATE(1,.t.,alias())
 SCATTER MEMVAR memo
 APPEND BLANK && NOW FAILS HERE
 TABLEUPDATE(1,.t.,alias())
 GATHER MEMVAR memo

The failure now occurs on the append blank.
Frustrated in Bath township
Vince