Our company has a small Web (WS2003)/Application server that includes a collection of VFP com services that read and write records across our LAN to a File server. Suddenly, whenever VFP attempts to close a table after inserting or updating one or more records, the following occurs:

VFP is unable to open that or any other table. VFP is essentially frozen.

The instance of VFP cannot be stopped in the “applications” pane of the Task Manager, nor the vfp#.exe instance in the “processes” pane.

Windows Explorer is unable to browse any LAN shared folder.

After about 20 minutes, VFP comes back to life, and Windows Explorer is again able to browse shared folders – until, of course, another manual insert or update attempt.

We have tried and/or observed many things in our efforts to correct the problem:
Office (workstation) computers can insert and update records with out freezing.
All server computers involved have been re-booted.
The Web/Application server has sufficient free disk space.
Ethernet cards, cables and switches have been replaced.
Updating test records on a Backup server results in the same problem.
This problem occurs independent of IIS and VFP services. (both are stopped)
This problem occurs by simply opening, updating, and closing a table through the VFP command window.
VFP 8 was reinstalled. Also installed and tested using VFP 9, thereby eliminating a corrupted foxuser.dbf as the cause.
“System Idle Process” remains at 97-99% cpu usage while VFP is frozen, so we are unable to identify an underlying service that is causing the freeze-up.
No changes were made to the configuration of our server computers, nor changes to any existing user accounts (or their privileges). Also used different user accounts (all with admin privileges) when we tested to a backup file server.

Any ideas as to the real cause of this dilemma will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks to everyone in advance,

Andrew Burton