I think the syntax you want to use is

USE (lcAlias) IN 0 NOUPDATE AGAIN SHARED

Without the parenthesis, you're opening a file named lcAlias and not the file referred to by the variable lcAlias.

HTH...John

>> Is EXCLUSIVE set on? If so VFP will try to open the database exclusively even if you open the table SHARED.
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>Josh,
>
>Thanks for the reply. This is whay I thought too, but when I looked in VFP help under the USE command, this is what I found:
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>SHARED Opens a table for shared use on a network. SHARED allows you to open a table for shared use even when EXCLUSIVE is set ON.
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>To further test, I set EXCLUSIVE on and then issued the USE lcAlias in 0 NOUPDATE AGAIN SHARED command in the command window twice. When I enter SET and look at my default datasession I see the table opened twice?
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>I am calling a custom method from the BeforeReadEvents Method of my application class. The strange thing is I can see the standard framework databases (appincl, errorlog ... ) are being opened twice with what appears to be the same command syntax.
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>Kind Regards,
>
>Mat