Actually, your suggestion did help. I went into the property of the problematic table in the dbc table and could see that the location (relative to the dbc location) was wrong. I was able to edit it, but one of the fifteen 'box' characters leading the table location was instead an equal sign. When I did validate database, message was 'property corrupted.' If I could somehow restore the correct leading characters I might be okay. But when I try to copy another related table's leading characters (presuming they are the same) I get just one "box" character.

Actually, the system is running okay at the moment. Using your tip about the dbc table, I did try killing the problematic table record and re-adding the table to the dbc. As I said earlier it has left some orphan field records but (knock on wood) it seems to be working okay.

Any thoughts on the leading "box" character cleanup? What is the content of those fifteen "boxes"? (Sorry for the poor framing of this question.)