Hi Mike,
while I agree with you that it is best to assume multiuser access,
the following is too general IMHO:
> There is little speed benefit to exclusive use over shared.

That depends a lot on the app and even the style of vfp the app is written.
And if you can be sure nobody else uses the table, try flock() on the table -
that gives you even more speed. Works nicely on batch processed datacrunching.

regards

thomas