>A friend just asked me to try to recover data from some .dbf tables of his that were used as part of an executable program. The original programmer either died or retired, and there is no longer any help for this program.
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>He sent me the table, but when I attempted to open it, I received the infamous "Not a table" message. I wonder whether the table has been encrypted, and if there is anything that can be done about it.
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>I used the "Recover" program (Abri Technologies), but it determined the file to be in use elsewhere (this was false), and would not do anything with it.
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>Is there something that can be done with this file? The table I'm attempting to read is part of the executable, and has no problems when called by that program; do I need to get ReFox and reverse-engineer the original program?

What do you mean the table is part of the exe? How did your friend send it to you if it's "part of the exe"? :)

I think you may mean it's used by that exe. If it's now corrupt, there's not much you can do. Refoxing the program may let you determine the field names in the exe and even the data types and sizes so you can rebuild the file.

You may be able to look at the file with a hex editor and get the field names from there.