>OK, I have deleted the foxuser.dbf. I will keep going to see if it solves the problem. May I ask what that might have to do with the data environment loosing tables?
>
>Thanks very much for your help.

FOXUSER.DBF (and .FPT - don't forget to delete this one too.) is the vfp resource table, which keeps track of changes made to the Visual FoxPro environment. When you work a lot, it gets big and sometimes can give strange things. Corrupted FOXUSER was the problem for tables disappearing from DE (Napoleon Yam had this trouble in the beginning of August - thread # 124329)

From the Help:
***
The resource file is a Visual FoxPro table that contains information on system and user-defined resources such as keyboard macros,
preferences, system window locations and sizes, diary entries, and so on.
***

Nick