Carl-
As Craig say, use SET DATABASE TO to make sure your target DBC is the current one. Also, it may not really apply to the way you have things structure, but you can specify the database container in some ways... For example, the CREATE FROM command (from the help):
CREATE
[FileName1 [DATABASE DatabaseName [NAME LongTableName]]]
FROM [FileName2]


>My problem is new tables getting created in the wrong dbc

...snip