thanks a lot Al for the point in right direction. Many things here that would take me half a year to fix. but i follow you on everything and understand your reasoning. I take your point of select in two different area - in fact i close all databases before and after i start the auto complete program to bypass this problem. And unfortunately that "name' field has come up to bite me a number of times - too pervasive at this point to fix. I can however change the index 'name' to another without too much effort.

I have a find and replace program (freeware) that can find specific words in 1000's of programs and change them automatically in about 10 seconds. comes in handy for problems like these.

thanks again Al. Your comments have been filed in my help manual.

k
>NAME is a reserved word in VFP, i.e. it's not a good idea to name variables, columns, tables, index tags etc. "name". If you can, change them to something else.
>
>I can't tell from the code you show, if you're stomping on an already open Students table by opening it again in the same work area (?) If so you can try some ideas from my other reply to prevent that from happening.
>
>Also, is there a reason you keep indexing the table on the fly, rather than just once? You need exclusive access to INDEX, that's not multi-user friendly.
>
>>thanks yes i do. i believe i have gone one more step on this - could the solution be this Al?
>>
>>Here is the first phase of the program to create automcomplete
>>

>>Select 0
>>Use c:\db\students.Dbf
>>***********************************************
>>Index On Name Tag Name &&& this invokes and cdx index file
>>Set Order To Tag Name
>>

>>Yet before this event occurs i have the following index running
>>

>>use students
>>Index on name to name.
>>

>>I believe the duplicate target is the source of the conflict so i have renamed the tag name1
>>
>>Index On Name Tag Name1 &&& solution???
>>Set Order To Tag Name1
>>
>>
>>k
>>
>>>>Ok i have finally isolated the problem - all i need now is to find a solution.
>>>>
>>>>The CDX is actually the index file that is created when auto-complete is used in one of my menus. Hence the double index - the one i use to sort on name and the one vfp creates to fill in the auto-complete. If i delete it, it creates a new one directly i use the autocomplete feature.
>>>>
>>>>Now to the heart of the problem - the error messages we receive are that the cdx is missing - when in fact it is there! We press ignore and the problem goes away - operation is normal. the autocomplete works fine. It does it sparodically. my solution is write a short on error program to ignore error #1707 - but it hardly seems like a dignified solution.
>>>
>>>If you have a comprehensive error handler, it can log a lot of information like program call stack, values of variables, open tables/currently selected table etc. You can then examine these log files for clues about what's going on.
>>>
>>>If you don't have a comprehensive error handler, you could try Download#29837 (haven't used it myself)