Well, I solved the problem and figured I would put out here for posterity (and to help save the sanity of another who may have done the same thing I did....).

The problem turned out to be something I did which, at the time, I thought would save me a few minutes. During the upgrade from Win98 to 2 new XP machines, I copied not only the foxpro directories, but the windows desktop shortcuts as well. It turns out that XP must deal with these PIF files differently than 98 as the programs behaved unpredictably until I started them up with freshly made shortcuts. All ran fine from there.

Moral of the story; there are no shortcuts to reliability in this business (pun intended).

Thanks for your ideas!

>Your client's foxpro screen might be crash before that try, so the file seem opened yet. In that case I restart client's pc so file will free.
>
>>This is an interesting one....I have a client who is happily working away with their Fox 2.6/DOS app on an XP (SP2) network. Everything works well except for one procedure which executes the following statement:
>>
>>

>>sele c
>>use &gapchk
>>copy stru to &laptck
>>

>>The last statement crashes with a "file access denied" error. The laptck variable shows the value "aptck08" which is a valid filename. No one else uses this procedure, so there isn't a chance of two people trying to print checks at once.
>>
>>The result is, that the error is actually false, as the file gets written just fine. Press "ignore" and go on, things work. However, this is obviously not a good way to run the program and I would like to figure out what's happening.
>>Any ideas are greatly appreciated....
>>
>>Thanks!