>I created a function to remove the letter or volume front of the full path
>
>but sys(5) seems to remove more than only the volume name
>
>xPath = STRTRAN (FULLPATH(" "),SYS(5), " ")
>
>= MESSAGEBOX(xPath)

That's because in case of a network path, the "drive" has the syntax \\servername\sharename\. Now sharename may be a simple directory on a disk on the server, but you don't know exactly which disk is it there, because the disk drive letters are internal to the machine there. So in your case the A1 is not a directory name, it's a sharename. There may be no directory with such a name, because the share may be something like \\TheServer\SharedDocs and on TheServer machine it may mean "C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\ALL GOOD USERS\DOCUMENTS". There's no SharedDocs directory anywhere; it's just a name of the share, an alias.