>>>Out of nowhere I am starting to get a lot of complaints from my customers with "a file is locked" error or "cursor is read only". I'm talking about customers that have not had an update for over 6 years and new customers so I know it's not my software. Has anyone else seen this? My guess is M$ put out an update? I'm getting this on 6 year old XP PCs and new Win 7 PCs. Any guesses? Maybe an anti-virus program? Hmmm, just realized a lot of them are running M$ Security Essentials but I can't say for sure it's all of them.
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>>It's possible it could be a problem with a Microsoft Security Essentials update but there doesn't seem to be a lot of noise on the Internet about any recent problems, and my experience with MSE has been pretty good.
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>>The November Patch Tuesday included the following Microsoft updates:
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>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-088
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-089
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-090
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-091
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-092
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-093
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-094
>>http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-095
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>>On a quick scan none seem to directly affect SMB file or record locking, you could check for yourself. Similarly there doesn't seem to be a lot of noise about any of these updates causing problems like that.
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>>If you are seeing this problem across a wide variety of environments, the next step is to figure out what they have in common. The first thing would be to absolutely rule out your program itself. In addition to code updates, some applications regularly push data updates out to clients. Is it possible your application does this, and the data have somehow become corrupted or otherwise not working as expected? Or, a data file was sent with the read-only bit set?
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>>Do you have any test or other code in your application that may have "expired" e.g. start working differently after, say, November 15 2013? What about any third-party libraries etc. you may have included?
>
>Thanks Naoto and Al
>I'm kinda leaning towards the anti-virus thing but the problem is totally random but happening much more than a few months ago. A few months back we would get this call maybe once every 2-3 months. Now we get it as much as several times a week or even a day. We have about 100 shops, each with a small to large number of PCs ,running our software so it's not like I can easily make a change to test it. However, if it keeps up I can track what anti-virus program they are running, what updates are installed and anything else on each PC that had the problem.

It might be worth getting a list of all 3rd-party software installed on computers showing the problem. Maybe there is a piece in common.

Malware could potentially cause issues like that. Hopefully that isn't it. There are also "gray" programs like add-on browser toolbars (e.g. Ask toolbar) that often get installed by default when updating programs like Java, Adobe Reader etc. Some of those toolbars are very invasive and try to monitor everything being run on a computer supposedly to "help" you with "more relevant" search results etc.

Then there are other valid utilities that might be interfering e.g. backup programs, or processes that index files in the background. My understanding is Google Desktop used to do background file indexing, I don't know if it still does.

The point is it's possible that updates to toolbars or indexers could cause them to start opening VFP data files where they previously might not.