Raphael Poliakoff wrote:

>I'd backup all the data to a CD (twice) and then have at it with VFP

Not a viable option at the moment. I'm not making the decisions on this (if I were, I would have spent a year setting up a parallel conversion, put it into commission all at once and have been done with it), and the powers that be here don't want to move that fast. I am stuck with dBase in this situation for now.

Scott Ramey wrote:

>The "File already exists" warning when indexing is not a
>big deal. The .ndx file you are indexing "to" already
>exists. You can (1) SET SAFETY OFF or (2) erase the
>.ndx file(s) before the indexing operation.

You missed what I said originally. The "File already exists" message is bogus. The program stops dead (users can only cancel at this point) at this and similar messages, because it's not really concerned with overwriting a file; it's apparently out of memory from (possibly) a too-large index file. It may also be out of memory when dBase is run multiple times and memory is not being released.

Originally, I thought all I had to do was delete the .NDX file and go on (and I wrote in code to do just those things). This is a memory allocation problem.