Old hat here as well, around W2K and vfp6 we had a special datasession of the tables that were relevant to the app and were opening in the background if no user action made vfp gears spin right from app start via timer and a simple stack build from a table...

>So - who can state with authority, what will happen to the data, if in the private data session form, a change is made and tableupdate is run? Will the data make it physically to the file or does it hang around in the buffer?

We flushed and data went to the disk - we had other problems sometimes from which the flushing practice grew. But do not go overboard opening all possibly usable files as this did tax vfp memory - at least in 6, and Calvin made more than minor changes later in the product, so this warning might be not important in 9 any more.