Hi John.

VFP decides the table name should be x_35k. How did that happen?

As Sergey points out, the table name is not the problem - it is the alias. Andy and I recently ran into something similar with a client who has dbf's with names like 6484.dbf - VFP barfs when you try to alias the table as 6484. For this reason, we have an OpenTable() method that returns the table's alias after it opens it.