Thanks very much for your reply. I gather then that it would be unwise to, say, copy a good dbc record of another table (thereby getting valid but perhaps incorrect binary info) and change the location-tablename and referential integrity info (which I can read) to that of my problematic table.

I'll probably embarrass you by saying so, but I still remember a lecture you gave at one of the VFP conferences (10+ years ago-I think it may have been Minneapolis) on tableupdate() that really helped me understand what was going on.

Thanks for your help here.