Hi,
Run Filemon from www.sysinternals.com to see if excel still has it's hooks into the file.

>I was using Excel to save a spreadsheet to a dbf, one called BlankEx.dbf.
>It was this file that could not be accessed even after closing excel
>from within Foxpro. I closed it by saying oExcel.Quit. Perhaps this was
>not enough. I solved the problem by first having Excel save the file
>as BlankEx.dbf and then as BlankEx2.dbf. Then I was able to subsequently
>access BlankEx.dbf