>Cant I make .dbc readonly or compile it into my .exe ?

Well, you now how easy it is to change a file from readonly to not readonly. If you think about something else than the file attribute, there is no such thing.

Compiling the dbc into the EXE could work, but then the DBC wouldn't be central, each user would have it's own DBC included in the EXE and I wonder how relative paths from table to DBC or vice versa would be interpreted.

Even if you get that working, eg by absolute table paths encoded in the DBC, you'd still need to exclude the DBFs, CDX, FPT etc. to not make them readonly. And then you can always get at the data anyway with ODBC or OLEDB Provider, just need to add an additional DBC file pointing to the same DBFs. Which by the way also is another way around database events, simply create a new DBC, copy DBFs and add them to this new DBC and the beforeopentable code of the original DBC is circumvented.

There is no security with DBFs other than file system security or fully encryption of the data within.

Bye, Olaf.