I have had flaky happennings with Memo files. My next version of my application hopefully will include FoxFire or something to fix damaged files - including memo files.

In the meantime I did the following with a users who had a damaged Memo file which, in turn, gave me the "Illegal Operation". I SCANned all of the records in the file with SCAN ... ENDSCAN. For each record I stored the memo data to a variable, Replaced the memo field with '' and then replace the memo field with the data in the variable (the original data). Crude but got me past the 'Illegal Operation".