>Hi Dave ----
>
>Try your RLOCKs with *no* buffering.

It did not work!
RLOCK returned .f. and I had to press escape to cancel the lock attempt.
The shared data is now placed on a dedicated file server and this has solved the problem. I dont want to do this because the dedicated server's resources are precious ,but it solves the problem for now.

The above result and my experiments lead me to believe this is a network software problem.

Thanks for the help,
Dave.