Rob,
as my experiences are with this problem, it is a problem of network comunication. The massage exactly means (from doc.), that another user opened an transaction and didn't finish it yet. But, as I expect you are not using transaction flag on the databases. So how it can process transactions. Answer is easy. Someone locked an record, and then during the update there occured an comunication error (or the communication was uncomplete) on the network.
If another user tryes to access the record in the moment (which can be in some cases very long), Novell returns error message which Foxpro understands as open transaction.

Libor