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

It is probably chr(0) or a character in that range (non-printable).