You're not dealing with an asian-language version of Windows are you? It's possible that double-byte version of the alphabetic characters was used in naming the file. For example FILE.TXT in Unicode would be (in hexadecimal)
0046 0049 004c 0045 002E 0054 0058 0054
On Japanese systems there is a "fullwidth" version of the alphabet so it's possible to have the filename using the following Unicode (in hexadecimal):
FF26 FF29 FF2C FF25 FF0E FF34 FF38 FF34

One thing that I learned was to avoid upper-ASCII characters (i.e. characters in range 128-255) in string literals, as many of the double-byte codings used in Asian-language systems uses upper-ASCII characters as lead-in or shift-in/shift-out sequences. Especially problematic is if these characters appear at the end of the string literal -- the closing quote often gets mistranslated as the second half of a double-byte sequence. this typically results in syntax errors being flagged since the closing quote is apparently missing. Perhaps the most confusing bit is that this could happen with "compiled" code in VFP -- so something works fine in English-language, but fails with all sorts of odd errors in Japanese-language or Chinese-language systems (I presume that similar problem will occur with Korean too)..


Of course, there's the obvious question -- are you sure that the file extensions aren't being hidden in Windows Explorer? Are you sure that the file you think is called DEV.TXT isn't actually DEV.TXT.TXT or DEV.TXT.DOC?