We have recently experienced a spate of serious network file and record access conflicts and could use some help on what to do about them. The symptom is the infamous "Record not available..." and "File in use..." internal FoxPro scrolling messages -- that are reputed to be from server overload or too complicated index tags, etc.

Application is a legacy FP-DOS-2.6 code, NOS=Novell-4.x and 3.12, OS=Win95/Dos Session, Ethernet. WAN links to remote users.

We have recently added remote users from Portland, Seattle, and Tempe over the WAN to our local FoxPro server (which is Netware-3.12) located here in Walnut Creek CA (ie: SF Bay Area). The remote users share tables among themselves for their location -- which are affected, but not between locations, except for the authorized users and authorized operations for each user -- and those are not the ones affected.

The MS KB Article Q125576 is about this problem, but does not give realistic answers or solutions for us. Basically it says -- wait it out. This doesn't work well, as whole departments are waiting for acces to the files and cannot complete their work until the conflict resolves itself.

Any ideas? Third party tools? We use NetLib for other stuff, but not currently for file or record locking. We have been fine with default FoxPro file and record locking up until now. The problem seems to arise when attempting to append a record and replace values in it. We have tried append-blank/replace, append-blank/gather, and insert-sql - all with random occurrences of this.

TIA.
Rob