>>>It is still odd that this specific file gives you problems. After working with DBF's for 25 years I have not seen something like this happening without a reason. Once I had an issue where a DBF file got corrupted sporadically, and for several years there was a workaround in the application that automatically rebuilt this file when this happened. The true source was never found until I investigated the application and found out a code that under certain circumstances deleted the CDX file of this table. This code was supposed to run only in Developermode, but found its way into production.
>>>
>>>One Question would be what the error is when this file cannot be opened (file corruption or access denied?). An alternative way to have this more resilient could be to change the format to XML or CSV. But I still believe there must be an error that causes the issue in the first place.
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>>Actually the error points to the application not being able to read the index file associated with this SDTMeta.
>>And I have rebuilt the index many times but to no avail. Oddly this happens with just one customer. I suspect that some PCs have an issue and it shows in my app. I have seen the same customers sending messages of Error 1104 Error Reading other files. Also, as I checked now, the CDX files.
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>We have this error periodically as well. We have never been able to identify the cause. It occurs on machines who have one of their local drives mapped and shared to other computers, as well as on dedicated servers.
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>We have disabled caching on the various machines to work around bugs introduced by local machine caching on a network drive in a multi-user environment. It still happens from time to time (we have a few hundred customers, 95% of which use our apps daily, and 80% of which use them heavily (nonstop) daily).

Thank you for sharing. I am glad I am in a good company :)
I don't have as many customers as you do. But you also used the "we" and I am just "me, myself, and I" :) And I don't have the resources and the time to look into every users' PC or something like this. I try to resolve, if possible, or minimize the issue, by making changes to the application.
One thing I am striving on is to convert all or as many customers as possible to SQL Server database. Right now I have about 50-50 split between VFP and SQL database. SQL data offers fewer issues.