Agreed, the issue is disconcerting indeed. You can't guess how much I wish a repro situation could be found.

As regards the extra 10 character field...
1) It's what I read, and the author seemed quite firm on both fields being there;
2) bytes are extra cheap, even in transfer these days the impact of 14 extra bytes is minimal.
There's lots and lots of thing that don't make a whole lotta sense in life, and especially in VFP.
Given that we don't know what work was done to 'prove' the C(10) field being needed, why not just add it and forget it? Anything else means you didn't implement the fix, but implemented it your variation. It may not help at all without the C(10) field.



>I can see the logic of the sys(1104) but the idea of the two dummy fields does not ring true. Typically the primary key is the first field, so adding 1 dummy field in front of the primary key would make some sense, but what effect would 2 fields have. This whole issue is disconcerting.