ah ye genius!

yes, thanyou. I'd removed a bunch of fields from the cursor till I have code ready to accept them, to not lose the code for these fields I dropped them above the cursor code and commented them. diddn't realise it'd pick up on the continuation bit

*!*				CLIENTID C(10),;
*!*				PREDATA C(100),;
*!*				DATAFILE C(150),;
		Create cursor mainlookup(PSPATH C(50),;
			TOTPACKETS C(10),;
			TOTRECORDS C(10),;

can I get away with blaming the code colouring of foxpro on this one? or is this a d on the hat for me?

Thanks again!

Ken.