Issue: Corrupt Memo Files

Hello all.

Memo fields (FPT files) are a great asset to our application. Regardless of our efforts to create "tight code", we continue to experience random corrupt FPT files. The problems are rare, but nonetheless irritating. Sometimes, the corruption is logical and due to HD cacheing, virus scanners, power outages, and questionable networks. However, we've also had memo file corruption in offices where the networks were stable and nothing had changed in years.

We've been using VPF since v2 and are currently on VFP8. The application has been stable in a variety of multi-user environments, in over 1000 offices.

Typical Environments:
Peer-to-peer XP-Pro SP2, Server2003, Server2000, Win2000. Always Cat5 and 100MB networks. We always have our customers disable Windows automatic updates, virus scanners on our folder, and the cache on all hard drives.

Cacheing the writes seems to be key to many data corruption issues in a multiuser environment. Further investigation has led me to articles detailing the registry settings for EnableOpLocks and EnableOpLocksForceClose in LanmanServer and LanmanWorkstation. (Microsoft article ID 296264 and 126026, and an older article on Superbase.com).

Questions:
1. Should we set the two registry settings mentioned above on server and client PCs, telling the OS not to cache?
2. Has anyone found that XP-Pro SP3 is causing more problems with FPT files?
3. Is it common to also disable Shadow Copy that copies files in background throughout the day?

Thank you for any advice, experience, and/or opinions.

David