Jim,
The error message basically is the one that says "this program has performed an illegal operation, windows need to shut it down etc"
The line that this hit this problem is the tableupdate line and it won't reach the aerror line at all.
On further checking, we have a problem as described in following paragraph.
The funniest thing is that when we run the tableupdate for the child table, the primary key and surrogate keys of the first record of the child table changes to a 9 digit number from nowhere and the rest of the field values disappears! We browse before the tableupdate line and everything is fine, we browse after the tableupdate line, the first line suffers the problems mentioned, after that we run into a C5 error and is thrown out. Both primary and secondary keys are integer values.
>We use the same method of updating for other parent and child tables (e.g sales, purchases etc) with no problems, only this particular file.

>The pseudocode goes something like:-
> begin transaction
> select parenttable
> generate primary key
> tableupdate(1,.f.,"parenttable")
> select childtable
> generate primary key for child table, populate parent's primary key as surrogate key.
> tableupdate(1,.f.,"childtable")
> if sqlcommit(connection)
> end transaction
> else
> rollback etc
> endif
>
Hope someone can help.
Yau